Public Accounting Firms Editing and Proofreading Services

An engagement letter tells a small business client that the firm will "provide financial statement services for the year ended December 31." The client, applying for a loan six months later, is told by the bank that a compilation does not provide the assurance the loan officer needs and a review is required instead, and the client is genuinely confused, because nothing in the engagement letter used the word "compilation," "review," or "audit," or explained that these are three different levels of assurance carrying three very different amounts of the accountant's actual verification work behind them.

We edit what public accounting firms produce to define the scope of a client engagement — engagement letters and their assurance level disclosures, service scope and deliverable descriptions, and the correspondence explaining to a client what a specific level of service does and does not provide. Our editors work on the sentence that has to tell a client what kind of confidence they are actually buying.

The disclosed assurance level is what an engagement letter actually needs to state plainly, and its failure is a description of the service that never names which of three meaningfully different levels the client is actually receiving. Financial statement services describes an output; it does not specify whether the accountant is compiling information provided by management with no verification, reviewing it with limited analytical procedures, or auditing it with the highest level of testing and assurance, and a client who does not know which one they bought will discover the difference only when a bank, investor, or regulator asks for a different one. We work through these so the specific engagement type is named explicitly — compilation, review, or audit — with a plain-language explanation of what that level actually involves, since a client choosing based on price alone needs to understand that the cheaper option provides no assurance at all, not simply that it costs less; so what the accountant does and does not verify is stated specifically, given that "the financial statements are the responsibility of management" is a standard disclaimer that a client reads without understanding it means the accountant did not test the underlying numbers in a compilation; so any known future need — a loan application, an investor requirement, a grant condition — is discussed at the point of engagement, because switching from a compilation to a review after the fact costs more and takes longer than choosing correctly the first time; so the deliverable itself states its assurance level on its face, given that a reader receiving the financial statements without the engagement letter attached still needs to know what level of verification stands behind them; and so a client's specific question about whether a given service will satisfy a specific third party's requirement receives a direct answer, not a repetition of the general engagement description. Letters written this way mean a client knows what kind of confidence they are actually paying for before they need it for something specific.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including engagement terms, client information and correspondence. We are editors rather than accountants, auditors or assurance specialists, and we offer no view on engagement scope, assurance levels or service adequacy. What we can do is make sure the letter names the actual level of service being provided.