Returning Value Blog

Every financial transaction your company records generates nonfinancial data that doesn’t have a dollar value assigned to it. Though auditors may spend most of their time analyzing financial records, nonfinancial data can also help them analyze your business from multiple angles.

Your CPA offers a wide menu of services. An audit is a familiar type of attestation service that provides a formal opinion about whether the company’s financial statements conform to U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP).

Businesses use two types of audits to gauge financial results: internal and external. Here’s a closer look at how they measure up.

Standard cost accounting doesn’t necessarily work for lean operations. Instead, lean accounting offers a simplified reporting alternative that generates more timely, relevant financial data. But it’s not right for every situation.

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) recently voted to finalize two related standards aimed at improving audits of accounting estimates and the work of specialists. Though the new, more consistent guidance would apply specifically to public companies, the effects would likely filter down to audits of private entities that use accounting estimates or rely on the work of specialists.

Distinguishing between liabilities and equity on a company’s balance sheet may seem straightforward. But difficulties arise when it comes to the terms of complex securities and financial contracts like redeemable equity instruments, equity-linked or indexed instruments, and convertible instruments.

In recent years, external auditors have focused more attention on related party transactions. Although related party transactions aren’t necessarily bad, they do raise some concerns about the risk of misstatement or omission in financial reporting.

In 2018, U.S. organizations that suffered a data breach lost an average of $7.91 million as a result. That’s the highest average organizational cost of all the countries and regions covered in the 2018 Cost of a Data Breach Study by IBM and independent research firm Ponemon Institute. Malicious or criminal attacks were the source of more than half of those breaches, rather than system glitches and human errors.

Like most businesses, you’ve probably experienced a significant increase in the number of customers who prefer to make cashless payments. And you may be wondering: How does the acceptance of these types of transactions affect the auditing of your financial statements?