Accounting policies, appraisal and benchmarking

We believe that you can benefit from taking a long, hard look at your business now and planning for the future. If you can attract and retain staff, impose tight financial management, and have a clear and focused strategy, and if you are prepared to put effort into strategic planning, marketing, business development and client relationship programmes, restructuring partnerships where appropriate, then you will have a competitive edge that will stand you in good stead for the future.

In particular, we believe that, by focusing on the right aspects of financial management, you can really make a difference to cash flow and the bottom line.

For cash flow, we can review the critical steps in your work/billing/collection cycle, identify any causes of slow cash generation, and show you how good cash management can help you generate more cash.

Then, by benchmarking against current data on comparable firms, and a profitability health-check, we can show you how to maximise profitability on your turnover.

To make sure we give you the best benchmarking picture, we liaise with other Horwath Clark Whitehill and Associate firms to increase the type, volume and range of data we can look at. This data currently includes:

• Fee income
• Total salaries and staff costs
• Professional indemnity insurance premiums
• Net profit
• Average fees per partner
• Average capital per partner
• Ration to net profit to fees
• Ratio of salaries to fees