You audit everyone else's numbers. Nobody audits how the firm earns.
This is what we would actually do, in what order, and what it costs.
No discovery call is required to see the number.
What we would go looking for
These are patterns that recur in an accountancy firm, written as things to
look for. They are not findings from a named engagement.
Recurring fees quoted years ago and never repriced, while the scope behind them grew every year the client did.
Peak-season capacity bought at contractor and overtime rates, absorbed into a seasonal average that hides what it actually cost against the fees it delivered.
Fixed-fee audit engagements that exceed their budgeted hours, with the overrun written off rather than billed or renegotiated.
Advisory work — the highest-margin line — delivered by whoever has capacity and never measured separately from compliance, so nobody knows what it earns.
Revenue concentrated in a handful of partner relationships, where the risk is not the client leaving but the partner doing so.
The sequence
Five weeks for one operating unit. More units run in parallel rather than in
series, so a group does not take five times as long.
Week 1
Intake and reconciliation9 requests written for an accountancy firm, alongside the 107 covering the operating spine. We tell you which findings the gaps will limit before any fieldwork starts.
Weeks 2–3
Full pass, not a sampleEvery engagement in scope is read rather than sampled.
Week 4
Quantification and challengeEach finding sized, and put to whoever owns it before it is written down.
Week 5
Report and walkthroughThe written report, ranked by annual value and by how hard each finding is to act on.
5 core requests written for an accountancy firm, inside the full intake.
Anything you do not have can be skipped with a reason — skipping narrows what the
review can conclude, and we tell you where before the work starts rather than after.
Client list with fee, service line and partner — Recurring versus one-off, and when each fee was last changed.
Standard fee, billed fee and write-off by engagement — Three numbers describe the same job; the gap between them is the finding.
Revenue by client, largest twenty — And by partner — concentration in a relationship is a different risk from concentration in a client.
Chargeable hours by professional, by month — Twelve months, so the season shows.
WIP and unbilled by engagement, aged — Including anything carried past the point a client will pay it.
If any of this is already happening
The review is always worth doing and rarely urgent. It becomes urgent when
something else is happening — and if one of these is, the sequence above compresses
to fit it.
Succession — a founding partner with no realistic internal buyer
A private equity or roll-up approach, which arrives with a quality-of-earnings request the firm cannot answer about itself
A peer review finding
Losing a top-ten client and discovering how concentrated revenue was
The season after a bad season, when capacity was bought and not recovered
Who needs to be in the room
Signs it: Managing partner or firm administrator
Will resist it: Partners whose book realization is about to become visible — worth telling them what the
review is for before they hear it from somewhere else.
Has been asking for it: The rising partner group, who inherit whatever is not fixed
What it costs
Priced by operating unit — an entity, a location, or a business the accounts are
kept separately for. The second unit costs less than the first because by then the
intake is built, the chart of accounts is understood and the patterns are known.
Purchase order is the primary route — most
buyers this size raise a PO and pay against an invoice on terms. Card and bank
transfer exist for those who prefer them.