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David Pearson joined Deloitte in January 2020 after several years in the military, changing careers to pursue a long-standing interest in company finances and how businesses operate.
For the vast majority of that time, he’s worked on the audit of a large multinational FTSE-listed company’s annual report.
By the time a company reaches the final stages of its annual report, it has usually been through months of its own drafting and verification, checking claims, updating drafts, and checking again. Auditors do their own verification work right at the end of that process, and many listed companies use Atticus to facilitate the final pass with their auditor.
We wanted to understand how the handover works in practice, and whether working in the same platform as the company changes how smoothly the two sides work together.
You’ve been working with a major multinational FTSE-listed company, facilitated through Atticus. Why is it important that a company like this verifies its numbers so diligently?
A company of this scale we’d call a PIE, a public interest entity, because of its size, because it’s multinational, and because it has a genuine public interest attached to it. When a lead partner signs an audit opinion, they’re saying the financial statements give a true and fair view of the company’s position. And what that’s really doing is giving the market confidence in what’s being reported.
It’s what lets people make decisions, to buy, to sell, to lend, with confidence that what they’re looking at is accurate.
We see what happens when that goes wrong. When an audit opinion turns out to be wrong, or a company fails and it could have been caught earlier, the impact on management, employees, and investors is significant. That’s front of mind for us. We want to deliver a high-quality audit, and we pride ourselves on being best in class.
You’ve done this verification process multiple times now, both before and after the company started using Atticus. How did you approach it before?
The annual report of a listed company contains a significant volume of data. Before Atticus, the underlying process by which we verified the accuracy of the report was the same but done in a very different way.
We’d identify all the data points we wanted to verify, and write them out manually in an Excel document, setting out which ones we could verify ourselves and which needed to go to management.
We’d end up with a very long, comprehensive Excel document that set out the items we’d verified and a summary of how. That was the before.
And after?
It was a lot quicker to identify the data points that we needed to verify, particularly in the front half commentary.
For example, instead of writing or copying items out into a spreadsheet, we could highlight them directly in the annual report, on the platform, with a click.
Once an item is highlighted, it's assigned to whoever needs to action it. Items we can tie back to our own audit procedures stay with us; anything else is assigned to management, who upload the supporting evidence straight into the platform. We can see what's been requested, who it's assigned to, and where it stands, without leaving the platform.
Highlight, verify, highlight, verify. That made the mechanics of the verification process much easier.
What was the biggest change you noticed between the old process and the new one?
Ease of operating and efficient collaboration.
Everything sitting in one place is what makes the collaboration faster. The item, its status, whether it's been assigned, the supporting documentation, are all visible at a glance. Before, we had multiple points of reference: Excel files, our portal, supporting documents, emails. With Atticus, we were able to record the bulk of our work in the platform itself, and that visibility brought real efficiency to the report verification process.
It's not just useful for us, either.
Whether you're on the management side or the auditor side, you're working from the same picture – the same list of items, the same status, the same supporting evidence, are visible to both sides at once.
That shared view also makes it much easier to keep senior stakeholders informed on progress.
What was it like adopting Atticus? My understanding is that the company introduced you to it. How did you find the onboarding?
We started using Atticus because our client had adopted it, but we saw the benefit for our own side of the audit too. As a firm, we actively look for tools that bring rigour and efficiency to the audit process, and that support communication with the entities we serve. We saw quickly that Atticus could support our audit of the annual report in this way, so we were happy to use it.
As with any new tool, there was a bit of a getting-up-to-speed period. We had a few calls with our client, plus a direct line to an Atticus contact for anything we weren't sure about. We picked it up quickly, and any questions we had were resolved fast. I wouldn't say that period should put anyone off.
Did using Atticus have any effect on the timing of the process? Did bringing in a new platform slow things down at all?
No, if anything, the opposite. Any time pressure we experienced came from the sheer volume of data points to verify – that's simply the nature of a report this size. That’s why it’s helpful to use technology that facilitates a simpler and more user-friendly verification process.
What would you say to a listed company deciding whether to bring its auditor into a platform like this?
I'd say have the conversation with your auditor. As I said, as a firm we’re always open to using technology where it genuinely improves a process. If we came across another client using the platform, we'd be happy to do the same again.
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