Charles said, “I think one of the things that we always worry about is that auditors turn up, sit in a room, and don’t have any interaction with us, which is what sort of thing we found in the past.”
“We were looking for someone who would understand what we do,” Charles said. “We wanted a company that was attuned to what our needs were in terms of timing, in terms of length of audit, and in terms of the quality of the staff we were going to have doing the audit.”
Charles isn’t alone. The need for better commercial value and better insights is something that is being recognised across the business landscape.
“Businesses generally look at audit as a necessary evil,” he explains. “If we didn’t have to do one, would we? It would all depend on what our circumstances are. So, when we are talking to our auditors, we are always trying to get insight into what our problems are going to be for the next year, how we should be treating things further forward.”
Charles added, “That was one of the good things about our relationship with yourselves, we felt free to ask you questions. We felt free to open ourselves up and talk about some of the issues that we thought we would be facing in the next year so that we could get that sorted out in advance.”