Evidence

What fieldwork left behind

These notes come from finance directors, controllers, and group accountants who sat through inventory counts, confirmation chases, and draft-finding meetings with our team.

“Their team spent three days on our warehouse floor before touching the general ledger. The inventory observation notes they left with our controller were detailed enough that our Tokyo parent stopped asking for a second opinion.”

Michiko Tanaka

Finance Director, regional distributor · Statutory Financial Statement Audit

“We had hoped for a shorter timeline. Fieldwork ran a week longer than first sketched because our subsidiary ledgers were incomplete. Once those gaps closed, the management letter arrived promptly and without theatrical language.”

James Okada

CFO, food processing group · Statutory Financial Statement Audit

“The internal control walkthroughs caught a purchase-order approval gap we had lived with for years. They did not inflate the finding; they explained the control risk in plain terms our operations managers understood.”

Yui Nakamura

Controller, precision parts maker · Internal Control Assessment

“Our overseas board needed an English summary of the Japanese statutory opinion. Elena’s briefing matched the formal report without inventing comfort the opinion never gave.”

Robert Hale

Group Controller, EU parent company · Bilingual Assurance Reporting

“Interim review before year-end saved us from discovering a cut-off problem in March. The sampling plan was explained up front, so our staff knew which invoices to pull.”

Sora Fujimoto

Accounting Manager, hospitality chain · Interim Account Review

Extended story

Year-end cut-off at a two-warehouse distributor

A regional distributor needed a first-year statutory audit after its Tokyo parent required Japanese GAAP opinions for the Kyushu subsidiary. Opening balances were incomplete: one warehouse had never performed a full physical count, and consignment stock from a Korean supplier sat unlabelled on shared racks.

We delayed substantive testing of inventory by eleven days while the client staged consignment separately and completed tag training. Fieldwork then ran across both sites with dual observation teams. Three cut-off exceptions surfaced — shipments recorded a day early — and management posted adjusting entries before the draft opinion circulated.

The parent’s group controller received Elena’s English briefing the same week as the Japanese report. The briefing flagged the cut-off adjustments and the remaining control recommendation on consignment labelling, without claiming the opinion covered future periods.

Discuss a similar closing calendar

Extended story

Control walkthroughs inside a precision parts maker

A controller commissioned an internal control assessment after a lender asked how purchase orders above ¥500,000 were approved. Our walkthroughs showed verbal approvals for rush tooling orders and a shared login on the accounts-payable terminal during night shifts.

The management letter ranked the login issue as an operating failure and the verbal approvals as a design gap. Operations managers attended the closing meeting; they had never seen the control risk described without blame language. Remediation began with badge-based terminals before the next quarter’s lender review.