Accounting & Assurance Services

Assurance Services

Warren Averett offers full scope audits, as well as reviews. We conduct our audits under the concept of "understanding the entity."  This concept is based fundamentally on the fact that your company's business environment is unique. The primary objective of reporting on financial statements cannot be completed effectively unless the entity behind those financial statements is thoroughly understood. Additionally, business advice will not be constructive if it is offered prior to a thorough evaluation of the company's goals and the environment in which such advice will be used. By understanding the company, we gain a needed perspective to be used in performing an effective audit. Our audit approach places particular emphasis on the planning phase to ensure maximum efficiency and effectiveness.

The overriding concept of understanding the entity is to incorporate those procedures, and only those procedures, that will most effectively accomplish defined objectives in each specific engagement. This concept translates into a more efficient audit.

Key features of our financial statement audit:

• Extensive participation by the manager and partner in the financial statement audit, particularly in planning. Warren Averett uniquely positions its senior leadership as your key contacts, thus allowing for complete and efficient use of your time.
• Recognizing that the accountant's knowledge of your company is cumulative, the staffing goal for our audit is to provide the same individuals to ensure that knowledge of the client is not re-learned each year.
• A directional "top-down" methodology.
• Use of technology and data in electronic form whenever practical.
• In addition to downloading general ledger trial balances in electronic form, we may utilize our ACL software to a high degree on our financial statement engagements. ACL is a data extraction and analysis package which, in instances where we are dealing with multiple locations or accounts with a large volume of transactions, enables us to use advanced analytical techniques to gain supporting evidence more efficiently than through traditional sampling techniques.