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Services / 06 — Accounting & outsourcing
Bookkeeping, IFRS financial statements, payroll, management reporting and outsourced CFO — maintained to the standard the next reader will apply, whoever that turns out to be.
Most accounting problems are discovered by somebody else: an auditor, a lender, an acquirer's advisers, a tax officer. By then they are expensive. We keep books as though they will be examined, because in our experience they usually are.
Catch-up work is normal and we do a lot of it. Tell us how far back it goes and what triggered it — a financing round, an audit, a notice — and we will scope the reconstruction properly rather than guessing.
Our bookkeeper left and nobody knows where things stand.
We establish the current position first — what is reconciled, what is not, and what is missing — before touching anything forward.
Investors are about to run diligence.
Unreconciled balances and undocumented revenue recognition cost valuation long before they cost the deal.
Our auditor keeps raising the same points every year.
Recurring audit findings are usually a bookkeeping process problem, not an audit problem. They are fixable once.
We cannot tell whether we made money last month.
Management reporting that answers the question the owner is actually asking, on a fixed date each month.
Payroll is taking a day a week and we are still unsure it is right.
Salary tax withholding, EOBI and social security contributions handled as a process rather than a monthly scramble.
We need a finance function but not a full-time CFO.
Senior financial oversight at the level you need it, without the salary line.
Our lender wants monthly management accounts.
Covenant reporting prepared to the lender's format, on the lender's timetable.
We are a foreign company and need books kept in Pakistan.
Local statutory compliance and reporting in a format your head office can consolidate.
From a single bookkeeper's workload to a complete outsourced finance function.
The daily record, kept current and reconciled rather than reconstructed at year-end.
Statements prepared under the framework that actually applies to your entity classification.
Statutory obligations that fall on the employer, handled as a monthly process.
Reporting built around the decisions you actually make, not a standard pack.
A budget that is compared to actuals and explained, rather than filed in January and forgotten.
Senior financial oversight for businesses that need the judgement but not the headcount.
Designed once, documented, and not quietly amended by whoever is closest to the keyboard.
Physical verification against the ledger — the reconciliation most often deferred and most often material.
Books kept only to satisfy the tax filing will fail the first time somebody else looks. Each reader wants something different from the same ledger.
| Reader | What they are looking for, and what fails |
|---|---|
| Your auditor | Evidence supporting each balance and a clear audit trail. Fails on unreconciled control accounts, missing supporting documents and a chart of accounts that does not map to the reporting framework. |
| A lender | Cash generation, covenant compliance and reliability of the monthly numbers. Fails on management accounts that differ materially from the eventual audited position. |
| An acquirer's advisers | Quality of earnings, working capital normalisation and related-party transactions. Fails on undocumented revenue recognition and owner transactions mixed into the trading accounts. |
| The tax authorities | Consistency between the return, the financial statements and the withholding position. Fails when the three do not reconcile to each other. |
| A donor or grant funder | Expenditure traceable to the grant conditions and separately identifiable from other activity. Fails on pooled costs with no allocation basis. |
| Your board or shareholders | Whether the business made money, where, and what changed. Fails when reporting arrives too late to act on. |
| A parent company | Data in the group's format, on the group's timetable, reconciled to local statutory books. Fails on late submission and unexplained local-to-group differences. |
Bank, receivables, payables and intercompany balances are reconciled before any management accounts are released. A report built on unreconciled balances is a guess with a header.
Every deliverable is reviewed by a second qualified professional. This applies to a monthly management pack exactly as it applies to an audit opinion — proportionate to risk, but never skipped.
IFRS, IFRS for SMEs or AFRS for SSEs depending on your classification. Applying the wrong one is expensive to unwind, and it is usually discovered by an auditor rather than by the preparer.
Fixed dates for cut-off, reconciliation, review and release, agreed at the start. You know when the numbers arrive, and so do we.
Chart of accounts documented, policies written down, judgements recorded. The test is whether someone new could take over the ledger without a handover conversation.
We maintain books as though they will be audited, because most of them are. Records prepared this way make the audit shorter, cheaper and considerably less argumentative.
These are the firm's controls applied to accounting work specifically. The full set, applied to every engagement of any type, is published.
We work in the system you already use rather than requiring a migration you did not ask for.
Cloud and SME accounting platforms
ERP platforms
On ERP platforms we work at two levels. As your accounting team, we operate the finance module — transactions, reconciliations, period close and reporting. Where the requirement is implementation, configuration, migration or controls design, our technology practice leads it, with the accounting team specifying what the finance function actually needs from the build.
ERP implementation and IT governance →
We are your finance function. Bookkeeping, payroll, reporting and compliance, with a named team and a fixed monthly fee.
Your team keeps the daily ledger; we handle month-end close, review, reporting and the technical judgements.
Outsourced CFO and periodic review. We supervise, review and advise; your team executes.
Generally no. Preparing the records and then auditing them creates a self-review threat under the ICAP Code of Ethics — strictly prohibited for public interest entities, and dependent on materiality and safeguards for others. We tell you which applies at the outset. Many clients use us for accounting and a separate firm for audit, which is a perfectly normal arrangement and often the right one.
It is common and it is fixable. We scope catch-up work separately from ongoing bookkeeping, because reconstruction is a different exercise with different risks — missing documentation, unavailable bank records, staff who have left. We tell you what is recoverable and what will have to be estimated and disclosed as such.
It depends on your classification under the Companies Act. Public interest and large-sized companies apply IFRS as notified in Pakistan; medium-sized companies apply IFRS for SMEs; small-sized companies apply the AFRS for Small-Sized Entities. Establishing this correctly at the start avoids an expensive restatement later.
Yes — salary tax withholding, EOBI contributions, provincial social security, and provident or gratuity fund administration support, reconciled to the general ledger. These obligations fall on the employer, and defaults compound quietly until somebody looks.
No. We work in QuickBooks, Xero, Sage, Zoho Books, TallyPrime and Tally ERP 9, and operate the finance module in SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, Odoo and ERPNext. We recommend a change only where the current system is genuinely the constraint, and we will explain why rather than asserting it.
We agree a close calendar at the start — fixed dates for cut-off, reconciliation, review and release — and work to it. The realistic timeline depends on how quickly source information reaches us, which is why the calendar sets obligations on both sides.
Yes. Group reporting packs in the parent's format and timetable, reconciled to local statutory books, with the local-to-group differences explained rather than left as a balancing figure.
Normally a monthly retainer for an agreed scope, so it is budgetable. Catch-up and reconstruction work is scoped and priced separately, because its extent cannot be known until the current position has been established.
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