Financial Statement Preparation Editing and Proofreading Services

A note to the financial statements reads: "Revenue is recognised in accordance with applicable accounting standards." A reader trying to understand how this specific company recognises revenue from a multi-year service contract — at signing, over the contract term, or on delivery of specific milestones — learns nothing from this sentence, because it names a standard without stating how that standard was actually applied to this business, and the same sentence could sit, unchanged, in the financial statements of a company recognising revenue in a completely different pattern.

We edit what accountants and finance teams produce to disclose accounting policy in financial statements — significant accounting policy notes and their specific application, estimate and judgement disclosures, revenue recognition and other policy-specific notes, and the correspondence explaining to an auditor or reader how a specific policy was actually applied. Our editors work on the note that has to describe this company's actual practice, not merely name the rule it is following.

The specific policy application is what a financial statement note actually needs to state, and its failure is a reference to a standard that never describes how the standard was applied to the company's own transactions. Revenue is recognised in accordance with applicable accounting standards names the rulebook; it does not tell a reader whether this company recognises revenue at a point in time or over time, what triggers recognition for its specific type of contract, or how significant estimates within that recognition are actually determined. We work through these so each significant policy note states the specific pattern of application to the company's own revenue or transaction types, since a company with multiple revenue streams recognising each differently needs each pattern described, not one sentence naming a standard that could describe any of them; so any significant judgement or estimate underlying a policy is disclosed with what it actually depends on, given that "management uses judgement in determining fair value" says nothing about which inputs that judgement actually relies on, and a reader assessing the estimate's reliability needs to know; so a change in accounting policy or estimate from a prior period is disclosed with its effect stated specifically, because a policy note that reads identically to last year's despite an underlying change misleads a reader into assuming continuity that does not exist; so disclosures required for a specific standard state the specific figures the standard requires, rather than a general statement that the standard was followed; and so an auditor's or reader's specific question about how a policy applies to a specific transaction type receives a direct answer, not a repetition of the general policy language. Notes written this way describe what a company actually does, not just which rulebook it claims to be using.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including financial data, accounting policies and correspondence. We are editors rather than accountants, auditors or financial reporting specialists, and we offer no view on accounting policy, estimates or disclosure compliance. What we can do is make sure the note describes the actual application, not just the standard's name.