Who This is for
The date is fixed, and the books are not in a state to produce them.
Overdrafts, trade finance and periodic account reviews tend to arrive with a request for financial statements attached.
Re-domiciliation typically requires audited statements to the receiving authority and an auditor’s solvency letter to the departing registry. Both are gates, not formalities.
Unaudited management figures rarely survive a data room, and a valuation built on them tends to be renegotiated.
Worth establishing before somebody else establishes it for you.
When Audited Accounts Are Actually Needed
Annual renewal — depending on jurisdiction, licence type and size. Not one rule: the same company can be exempt in one zone and obliged in the next.
We confirm which requirements apply to your entity at the outset, against your actual jurisdiction and licence.
Facility application, credit review, periodic KYC refresh
Diligence, valuation, completion accounts
Solvency letter before exit clearance, on re-domiciliation
Application for continuation, on re-domiciliation
Annual or periodic regulatory submission
Final accounts before deregistration
What's Included
How it Works
Establish the requirement
Which authority is asking, what form it accepts, in what timeframe, and whether the auditor must come from an approved list. A general assumption about “the audit” is the wrong starting point; the requirement is specific.
Assess the state of the records
The auditor tests records; the auditor does not create them. We review what exists, identify unposted periods, unreconciled accounts, unsupported balances and missing documentation, and tell you what must be fixed before an audit is worth starting.
Close the year and prepare the statements
Adjusting entries, provisions, depreciation, foreign exchange, related-party and shareholder balances documented, cut-off tested; then statements and notes, including the disclosures clients most often omit — related-party transactions, going concern, commitments, contingencies.
Audit fieldwork, points and opinion
The licensed auditor tests balances and transactions, samples documents, and issues confirmation requests; our role is to answer, produce and resolve, because the elapsed time in an audit is mostly waiting. Where the auditor cannot obtain what is needed, the opinion says so — permanently.
Signature and filing
Directors or shareholders approve the statements, the auditor signs, and they are filed with whichever authority required them, and provided to the bank, investor or regulator that prompted the exercise.
What We Need from You
Related-party and shareholder transactions are the item most often understated, and the item auditors examine most closely. Disclosing them is materially better than having them found.
Timeline and Cost
An audit of a company with current, reconciled books is a defined exercise with a predictable duration. An audit of a company whose books must first be reconstructed is two exercises, and the first governs the timetable. Where time is actually lost: unposted periods, unreconciled bank accounts, missing documents, unanswered confirmations, and shareholder balances nobody can explain. The auditor’s fieldwork is rarely the constraint.
If a bank or a registry has given you a deadline, tell us the date at the first conversation — it changes the sequence of the work, and occasionally it changes the honest advice. Our fee is fixed and agreed in writing against a defined scope — entity count, transaction volume, currencies, group consolidation, and the state of the records on the day we start — anchored to the work rather than to turnover, assets or the value of the transaction the accounts are needed for.
The auditor’s own fee is separate and payable to the audit firm.
Get a Fixed QuoteWhere it Goes Wrong
A bank asks for audited accounts on a Tuesday for a facility closing at month end. If the books are current, that is a scheduling question. If they are not, no amount of urgency compresses it, because the auditor cannot test records that do not yet exist.
Forced balances, wrong cut-off, transactions posted to whatever account made the trial balance agree. The auditor’s response is more testing, then either a longer engagement or a modified opinion. A modified opinion does not disappear — it is read by the next bank, the next investor and the next registry.
Expenses paid from the company account with no business purpose, company costs settled personally, cash moved in both directions without documentation. This produces a shareholder account that cannot be explained, and it is examined in every audit of an owner-managed entity.
Sales to an entity the same shareholder owns, a loan from a family member, a management charge between group companies, a property leased from a director. These require disclosure, and omitting them is the failure most likely to change an auditor’s view of everything else in the file.
Bank, legal and customer balance confirmations are frequently the longest item in the calendar, and nobody chases them until the auditor reports they are outstanding.
Some registries and regulators will accept a report only from an auditor on their own approved list, or registered with the relevant federal authority. An audit performed by a firm outside that list can be rejected after the work is complete and paid for.
Questions
Does my company need an audit?
It depends on your jurisdiction, licence type and size — there is no single UAE-wide rule, and free zones differ from one another. Banks, regulators, investors and counterparties may also require audited statements regardless of what your registry asks for. We establish the position for your specific entity rather than applying a general assumption.
Can you complete an audit in a few days?
Not from records that were never maintained. Where the books are current and reconciled, an audit is a defined and reasonably quick exercise. Where they are not, the bookkeeping has to be reconstructed first, and we say so at the outset rather than discovering it midway.
Do you audit your own bookkeeping clients?
Independence prevents the same party from preparing accounts and issuing an opinion on them. We prepare the financial statements and manage the process; the opinion is issued by a separate licensed audit firm.
What if several years were never audited?
They are addressed oldest first, because each year’s opening balances come from the year before. Common, remediable, and better addressed deliberately than at a renewal counter.
Is an audit the same as a corporate tax return?
No. They are separate exercises with different rules, and audited statements are not a substitute for a return. Both read from the same accounting records, which is why the records are the real dependency.
Will an audit find things I would rather it did not?
Sometimes. Undocumented drawings, unrecorded liabilities and unsupported balances surface. Finding them in an audit you commissioned is better than having a bank, a buyer or an authority find them.
Can you help if the auditor has already raised concerns?
Yes. We review what has been raised, establish what is factually supportable, and address the points. What we do not do is press an auditor for an opinion the records do not support.