Financial Statements & Auditing

Financial statements are no doubt an important document in any business as they allow a real-time view of what’s happening financially in the company, it examines the finances and its disclosures.

Using a smaller outsourced partner can be a lot more cost-effective than using a large accountancy firm. If you are a large player in your home market, you could be relatively small in scale when moving across into the UK market, so finding a partner to reflect your scope is essential. An audit involves understanding the business and the environment to assess where there could be potential risks impacting the financial statements, looking at the effectiveness of a company’s controls. This can include looking at transactions to see what the degree of effectiveness is. Depending on the result of the first stages of a financial audit and the effectiveness of it, there may be further stages required, or the audit may be tidy enough to scale back on other later elements.

When moving to the UK, you may be required to fulfil an audit on your company’s annual accounts. There are various ‘audit qualifiers’ which are listed below.

When your company is required to have an audit:

• If it’s a public company 
• If it’s a subsidiary company
• An authorised insurance company carrying out insurance activity
• Involved in banking 
• A corporate body with shares traded on a regulated market within the EEA
• A ‘Markets in Financial Instruments Directive’ investment firm or an ‘Undertakings for Collective Investment in Transferable Securities’

For financial years after 1 January 2016

Your company could get an audit exemption if two of the following are true:

•  An annual turnover of no more than £10.2 million
• Assets not worth more than £5.1 million
• 50 or fewer employees 

Ask us about other exemptions for financial years before 2016.

Businesses operating in the UK must pay corporation tax on profits if they are carrying out their business under the basis of a:

• Limited company
• Any foreign company with a UK branch or office
• Club or cooperative 

Companies do not get billed for corporation tax, they must work it out. This is where Goodwille can work with you to keep a record of the amount of corporation tax you will need to pay. By keeping accounting records, you can calculate how much corporation tax you will need to pay.

Our clients work with us because they are confident in our approach to managing their financial statements. We always work with our fully vetted and carefully chosen auditing professionals when carrying out an external audit for our clients.