Assurance Support

An external assurer will ask for the boundary note, then for one figure chosen at random and the file it came from. We build that file in advance. Every number in the inventory is traced back to the export, invoice or meter reading it rests on, and anything modelled is labelled as modelled before anyone else has to point it out.

Then we sit in the room. Questions arrive faster than a finance team can answer them while also doing its own job, and an answer improvised under pressure is how a correction gets made the following year.

• An evidence pack indexed the way an assurer reads it
• Liaison through the engagement, in the meetings and between them
• A response log recording every question and the answer given
• A list of the figures we expect to be challenged, prepared first

Assurance has a scope of its own, and it is rarely the whole report. Limited and reasonable assurance ask for different weights of evidence, and a figure inside scope needs a file that a stranger can follow without us in the room. We agree what is in scope before the pack is built, so nothing is assembled twice.

They opened with the three numbers in our last report we could not stand behind. An uncomfortable hour, and it saved us a correction.

Four to eight weeks, depending on how much of the evidence already exists in a form somebody else can read. Where source documents are already filed against the inventory lines they support, it is the short end of that range; where each one has to be found and identified individually, it is the long one.

You keep the evidence pack and the response log. Next year the same questions arrive, and most of the answers are already written down with a date and a name against them.