Statutory audit services

For many businesses, a statutory audit is a legal requirement. However, when designed and executed well it can add significant value. Beyond quality compliance, the audit team can leverage their experience to bring you valuable insights into your systems, controls, internal reporting and team. It can help build trust with stakeholders and highlight wider challenges and opportunities for your business.

As a CFO, FD, business owner or an Audit Committee Chair, it is important you choose a firm that combines a quality service whilst supporting your wider agenda.

At S&W we have a robust statutory audit framework, utilising leading edge audit technology and have a quality, experienced team of sector specialists from trainee to partner. However, it’s how we bring that together and lead our teams that makes the real difference.

What makes an S&W audit different?

Proactive, engaged leadership

Our clients tell us over and again that the key to bringing our service to life is through proactive, continuous engagement from our senior team. There is no point in having a strong team if they are not actively collaborating with both your team and ours.

Our leadership teams drive the discussions, debate and strategy at every stage of the audit cycle, attending key meetings, reviewing throughout the process and taking ownership for delivery.

Focussing on what matters when it matters

We work with our clients to devise a plan and resolve issues robustly, effectively and efficiently by focussing on what matters most. Significant time is spent planning to pinpoint key audit risks and to devise testing strategies that meet our aims and that you understand. The most significant matters are dealt with and resolved early in the process.

Outside of the annual cycle, we have regularly scheduled discussions and open lines of communication. That enables our team and yours to raise emerging issues, discuss the specific impact on your business and carry out advanced year-end work.

Communication, communication, communication

Effective communication is pivotal to making the audit run smoothly. That is true of the interactions between our team and yours, as well as the discussions we have internally.

We facilitate that conversation by agreeing an approach that works best for our clients. We find a degree of onsite interaction greatly facilitates the audit process but can be flexible. Typically, our approach includes:

Ensuring significant on-site presence by the team, manager and responsible individual (RI)
In-depth discussions to ensure we understand all areas of testing and their relevance before proceeding
Developing a detailed timetable and information request with you in advance and then proactively monitoring and managing delivery on both sides
Regularly scheduled engagement meetings with the senior team and yours to drive progress and resolve issues during the year-end cycle.

Hear it from our clients

As the audit signatory, I really appreciated the background knowledge of the business and confidence around technical financial reporting matters, as well as the advice and support on various technical matters that were very helpful to me when I joined as CFO.
CFO
Online clothing retailer, medium-sized, pre-profit, first time audit, VC-backed

The things that impressed me most about the team were their knowledge of our market, their customer service orientation and their technical skills that enable compliance with our UK tax, accounting and auditing obligations.
FD
UK Subsidiary of a fast-growth international law firm, headquartered in Europe

S&W’s auditors are proactive and pick up the phone to discuss issues rather than relying on written communications. They have given me guidance over my team's performance and that has helped me shape personnel and processes. We provided some strong pushback at last year's audit from myself, the audit committee and the PE partner, which the team took head-on. They were open to the challenge and were pragmatic enough to work with the technical team internally to facilitate a more refined position when considering the wider facts.
CFO
Medium-sized, fast-growth tech company with private-equity investment

Delivering the brilliant basics

No matter how glossy the high-level service might be, we need to deliver the basics to a high standard and the work must be delivered on time. Here is how we do it.

Our people

We recognise that the quality of the services we provide depends on the quality of the people employed to deliver the audit. We have stringent policies and procedures to ensure we recruit and retain competent, committed and responsible people.

We know how important it is for you to have a team you can get to know and trust. At a senior level, we choose excellent people with the right experience, expertise and chemistry to both challenge and support you. Once the team is in place, we will not seek to change any of the senior team members unless it is for reasons outside of our control.

We know the senior has an important part to play in succession planning and we therefore resource our teams to ensure there are adequate part qualified team members to give more scope for continuity on next year’s engagement.

It benefits both us and you to have continuity in the team from year to year. As our more junior team grow and develop, our intention is that they will rise through the audit team, with the juniors of today becoming the seniors of tomorrow.
Our quality

S&W is a registered auditor, regulated by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England & Wales (ICAEW). Our audit practice is subject to review by the ICAEW’s Quality Assurance Department.

We are focused on delivering the highest levels of service quality. That goes beyond just effective risk management and ensuring the technical quality of our work and advice. Our working style is practical and commercial. We will address any accounting technical or other matters with you in an open and collaborative way.
Our technology
The technologies we use are designed to support the delivery of an effective and efficient service, enabling the team to redirect time-savings back to engaging with you.

Our technologies undergo rigorous checks to ensure they are secure, meet data protection requirements and are encrypted to industry levels. These include ISO27001, SOC 1 and SOC 2.

Our core audit technology includes:
- Data analytics - our software provides a variety of quality enhancing tools, from extracting your financial data, revenue mapping and data analytics – all wrapped in a user-friendly, secure portal
- Inflo - With advanced, secure and transparent file sharing capabilities, our ‘collaborate’ portal enables the information flows between your team and our team to be held in one location and with clever workflows to help
- Automation and Optical Character Recognition - We use smart document matching tools which employ OCR and NLP to automatically search, find and match data in excel to a range of source documents to improve the quality and efficiency of your audit

Frequently asked questions about statutory audit

What is a statutory audit and who qualifies for it?

Statutory audits provide an independent examination of a company’s financial statements. The main objective of a statutory audit is to achieve financial transparency.

Annual statutory audits are a legal requirement for all companies with publicly traded shares, as well as for companies in the insurance, banking and investment sectors regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).

A company is exempt from a statutory audit if it meets two of three criteria for accounting periods commencing on or after 6 April 2025 (previous size limits in brackets):