Audit & Assurance

Audit Support Services

Audit support is the most carefully bounded service we offer. We perform documented, repeatable procedures under your instruction and your methodology. Every element of professional judgement, every conclusion, and the audit opinion itself remain with your firm and your Responsible Individual.

Accountancy practices

Discuss this service Engagement models

The problem

Fieldwork volume against a shrinking audit talent pool

Audit-qualified staff are among the hardest roles in the profession to fill, and audit remains the most heavily regulated area of practice. Firms need to expand fieldwork capacity without diluting quality — under ISQM 1 the quality management burden has increased, not relaxed.

Audit teams face concentrated seasonal peaks around common year ends.
ISQM 1 has raised documentation and monitoring expectations across every engagement.
Junior audit resource is expensive to recruit and slow to become productive.

At a glance

Service line: Audit & Assurance
Delivered for: Accountancy practices
Typical cadence: Planned engagements — Resource booked against your audit calendar, typically a quarter ahead. Peak support — Additional fieldwork capacity for concentrated December and March year ends.
Engagement models: Available per job, on ad-hoc hours, or through a dedicated resource. Compare models.

Scope

Procedures we perform

Scope is agreed in writing before work starts and reviewed at each service review. Anything outside it is quoted separately rather than absorbed quietly and invoiced later.

Planning support

Permanent and current file setup in your audit software
Prior-year file roll-forward and lead schedule preparation
Analytical review preparation and ratio analysis
Materiality computation to your methodology

Fieldwork

Substantive testing across revenue, purchases, payroll and expenses
Sample selection to your defined methodology and sample sizes
Bank, debtor and creditor circularisation administration and follow-up
Fixed asset, stock and provision testing
Cut-off, existence and completeness testing
Journal entry testing and data extraction analytics
Tests of controls where the audit approach relies on controls

Completion support

Draft financial statements and disclosure checklist completion
Working paper referencing and file tidying to review standard
Consolidation schedules and group reporting packs
Points-forward and management letter point drafting

Software

Platforms we work in for this service

We work inside your existing systems under named user accounts. If your stack is not listed, tell us — we will confirm honestly whether we can support it immediately or need a ramp-up period.

CaseWare
Mercia
Inflo
CCH Audit Automation
MyWorkpapers
Excel-based methodologies

The boundary

What stays with your firm

This matters more than the task list. A delivery partner that blurs this line creates regulatory exposure for you, so we state it explicitly on every engagement.

Yours, always

The client engagement and engagement letter
Professional judgement and final review
Sign-off, submission authority and the fee
Client advice and the client relationship

Ours

Preparation, processing and documentation
Internal second-person review before release
Turnaround against the agreed timetable
Rework at our cost where the error is ours

Questions

Audit Support — what firms ask

All FAQs

Where exactly is the line on judgement?

We execute procedures; you form conclusions. We do not assess materiality thresholds, evaluate misstatements, conclude on going concern, decide the audit approach, or contribute to the opinion. Anything requiring the exercise of professional judgement is escalated to your team rather than resolved by ours.

How does this sit with our regulator and our ISQM 1 responsibilities?

As a resource operating under your methodology, your supervision and your review. Your firm remains fully responsible for the engagement and its quality management. We provide the documentation trail — who performed each procedure, when, and against which instruction — that your monitoring and any regulatory review will expect to see.

Do you work on listed or PIE audits?

We support non-PIE engagements as standard. Public interest entity work carries additional independence and regulatory considerations that need to be assessed case by case before we would accept it.

Services that usually move together

Most firms start with one service line. These are the ones that most often follow.

See the full picture

Talk to us about audit support.

Bring a real example — a live job, a difficult client file, a cycle you are behind on. A concrete case tells you far more about a provider than a capability slide ever will.

Book a scoping call See how we work

What to expect

No obligation and no minimum commitment to talk
A written proposal within five working days
A paid pilot before any long-term arrangement

Prefer email? hello@b4es.co.uk