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Blake Oliver

Did KPMG Fail as Silicon Valley Bank’s Auditor?

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In a recent Wall Street Journal article titled “Auditors Didn’t Flag Risks Building Up in Banks,” questions have arisen about whether KPMG failed in its duty by not highlighting the risk of held-to-maturity (HTM) bonds on Silicon Valley Bank’s balance sheet as a critical audit matter (CAM).

Let’s explore the concept of CAMs, the risks involved with HTM securities, and what the failure of auditors to issue CAMs for banks means for the accounting profession.

What Are Critical Audit Matters?

Auditors are expected to issue a critical audit matter (CAM) in their auditor’s report when they have identified a matter that is both material and involves an “especially challenging, subjective, or complex” judgment by the auditor. 

Introduced in 2017 by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), the goal is to improve the transparency of the audit process and increase confidence in the reliability and usefulness of the audit report to investors.

The Hidden Risk in HTM Bonds

Held-to-Maturity (HTM) securities represent debt securities that a company plans to retain until their maturity date. These securities are reported at their original cost, not the current market value, which can hide potential losses if the market value falls below the original cost. This, combined with flighty deposits, could threaten a bank’s stability.

Why Silicon Valley Bank Failed

Bad Management

In SVB’s case, the bank had unwisely invested significant deposits in United States Treasury Bonds without hedging against the risk of rising interest rates.

When interest rates go up, bond prices go down.

So when the Federal Reserve raised rates rapidly over 2022, the value of SVBs bond portfolio plummeted by billions of dollars. In fact, the bank’s losses of $15 billion at the end of 2022 would have wiped out almost all of its $16 billion in equity — had the bank not classified the bonds as HTM.

Concentrated Risk

SVB also experienced a significant concentration of depositors within the technology sector. As the Federal Reserve increased interest rates, the tech industry faced a downturn, resulting in a concurrent decline in deposits.

In early 2023, when the bank had to sell a portion of its HTM bonds to cover withdrawals, it incurred a sudden and unexpected loss of $1.8 billion. This spooked investors and depositors, triggering a bank run and resulting in the bank’s swift collapse.

Should KPMG Have Flagged the HTM Bond Risk as a CAM?

According to WSJ, Martin Baumann, former PCAOB chief auditor, believes that KPMG should have flagged the HTM bond risk as a CAM, as SVB’s unrealized losses “meet every definition of a possible critical audit matter.”

However, defenders of the audit industry argue that auditors cannot anticipate “extremely remote” scenarios like the one that brought down SVB.

A Wider Problem in the Banking Industry

WSJ examined the audit opinions of nine other US banks exposed to bond losses. Their auditors also did not flag bond-related issues as CAMs, focusing instead on loan losses, which brought down banks in the 2008 crisis.

So Where Does That Leave Auditors?

The SVB collapse is causing many to question the effectiveness of the CAM concept and the role auditors play in identifying potential risks. Changes to the way banks are audited may be on the horizon. And KPMG might find itself in court if shareholders decide to include the firm in lawsuits.

Stay tuned for future developments in the complex world of banking and auditing! Subscribe to Earmark Edge on LinkedIn.

The One-Point-Of-Contact Dilemma: Taming the Beast of Client Expectations

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Growing your accounting firm is exciting, but let’s face it: client management can become a circus act. One challenge that keeps many firm owners scratching their heads is when clients insist on having a single point of contact.

Here’s an example: Multiple team members are responsible for different tasks on the same engagement, but the client insists on always sending emails to just one contact person. This can be an extra hassle because now that team member needs to ensure everyone else is included and informed of important updates; otherwise, they risk missing out on crucial information. Meanwhile, that person has work to do! They may fall behind on email, leading to a less-than-desirable customer experience.

It may be tricky to satisfy customers who prefer one contact person. However, if we are committed to offering the best customer service experience and taking it seriously, we must find an appropriate way of granting this perk.

So how do you tame the beast of client expectations without turning your scalable process into a feat of acrobatics? Fear not! Here are two ways to solve this problem, recommended by a few forward-thinking firm owners.

1. Set up a Shared Email Inbox

The simplest way to step into the future of client communication is with a shared email inbox. Instead of relying on one person to handle communications, share emails across your team so any member can respond quickly and efficiently – no matter their current location or availability.

Brian Clare says, “The way I have explained this to clients is that when it is one-to-one work, it can fall behind because if that person goes on vacation and requests are locked in their emails, then we cannot act. With one-to-many, anyone can answer and knows how the client’s books work, and nothing is dropped when someone is not around. No one has pushed back on this.”

Jan Haugo also uses the shared inbox approach. She also ensures that systems and processes are the same from client to client, “so if someone goes on vacation, then you can interchange a person for that period. All information is transparent, making communication more seamless and easier to scale.”

Even with a shared inbox, it can still be challenging to get clients to embrace it. Sherrell T. Martin says, “I don’t get pushback from clients, but my assistant and I have to remind them to stop cc’ing our direct emails on everything. I think they think it will get answered faster that way. I use Front and have one general client email, but I was wondering if it would be better to have individual inboxes for each client.”

Two approaches to shared inboxes

As Sherrell indicated, you can set up shared inboxes in two ways.

Option one is to create a shared inbox for each customer. This method grants the team working on them immediate access, making it convenient and straightforward since you only need Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace’s native features. Nonetheless, as your list of clients grows, this tactic can take more effort since you’ll have to set up a shared inbox for each new client, plus manage access for your team.

The second option is to have a unified email address for all client communication. For instance, “clients@myfirm.com.” This is easy to manage as your firm grows since you don’t have to worry about setting up a new inbox for each new client. However, you’ll quickly need specialized software to route emails to the appropriate team members. Fortunately, this has been solved with help desk tools such as Help Scout or Front. These tools also allow you to funnel all outgoing emails from the same address, ensuring that replies go back into the shared inbox.

2. Provide a Client Concierge

Another approach is to embrace the single point of contact and even take it to the next level by providing a “client concierge.” This team member’s primary role is to act as the customer’s advocate within the firm.

Ideally — and this is important — the client concierge does little or no client work themselves. This way, they can focus on responding quickly, forwarding those requests to the right team members, and getting back to clients immediately.

This concierge-level service may be expensive to deliver, and that’s OK. You don’t have to offer it to all clients. You may want to offer it only to your top clients paying the biggest bucks.

Clint Bowers says, “We found that without having one person to go to, our clients felt like they were the train conductor and would sometimes end up frustrated; they did not want to figure out which person to contact for different services. A client-specific shared inbox does help, and we use them, but it still did not create any sense of ownership for that client, and they felt that. So, although we still have multiple folks contacting them, they know who their ‘go-to’ is if they need it – sort of their ambassador. We are trying to build that sense of comfort.”

Dave Olsen configured Front to ensure every email is assigned to a team member, depending on the client. He says, “The client’s team gets each email, so anyone can address it. Whom the email gets auto-assigned to depends on the client. If there is a high volume of administrative tasks, such as many bills coming in, they will be assigned to the bookkeeper. The bookkeeper will then reassign them to the client manager or controller as appropriate. If there is less volume and mostly higher-level communication, the client manager will be auto-assigned, and they can reassign it to the controller or bookkeeper as needed. The client knows that the client manager is their primary day-to-day contact. The controller also builds a relationship with the client so that the client is never dependent on one relationship and knows they can go to the controller with any concerns.”

Conclusion: Balance Personalization with Efficiency

Ultimately, the key to managing client expectations while maintaining scalability is to strike the right balance between personalization and efficiency. By implementing one or both of the strategies above, you can foster strong relationships and ensure your clients feel heard, supported, and valued.

This article originally appeared in Earmark Edge.

Earmark CPE Recognized By Accounting Today as a 2023 Top New Product

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I’m honored and thrilled that Earmark is featured in Accounting Today’s list of 2023 Top New Products! Thank you, Accounting Today, for recognizing the hard work of our team and the value that our product brings to our members.

We look forward to continuing to serve the accounting community with CPE for listening to podcasts.

You can see the full list here: https://www.accountingtoday.com/list/the-accounting-today-2023-top-new-products

Peloton Co-Founder Sets Out to Create a Cost-Effective Alternative to ERP Systems for Startups

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Up until now, rapidly scaling mid- to large-size companies had no choice but to invest in enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems (think NetSuite, SAP, Oracle) in order to go public (IPO). But what if there was another option? One that doesn’t cost a fortune, doesn’t require a lengthy implementation process, doesn’t require time-consuming data migrations, and most of all has a simple, user-friendly interface.

That’s where Graham Stanton comes in. Graham is a co-founder of Peloton, a company that has become a household name for its technology-enabled fitness equipment and global subscription-based interactive fitness platform. He is also the co-founder and CEO of Avise, a software company that offers up a modern, cost-effective, and innovative alternative to ERPs.

You might be asking yourself, why would a Peloton co-founder with no formal accounting or finance background choose to create GL software? Let’s start from the beginning.

Peloton’s QuickBooks Journey

“It started with my co-founder, the CEO, sending me a spreadsheet of all the expenses the company incurred to date and saying we should probably do something with this,” said Graham on a recent episode of the Earmark Podcast. “It was pretty straightforward. There’s no revenue. There’s no accrual accounting. There’s minimal short-term liability. It really was just the cash we spent.”

But as time went on, Graham quickly realized that the company needed real accounting software. So they hired a CPA firm that set up Peloton on QuickBooks desktop. 

“I didn’t end up having a close relationship with this accounting firm to actually talk through how the business works and collaboratively figure out how to shape the accounting to represent the business as it was,” said Graham.

The accounting firm could file taxes, deliver GAAP compliance financials to investors and lenders, produce financial statements, and provide some degree of review, “but we couldn’t run the business off any of that,” remarked Graham. “And so that meant we ended up maintaining parallel systems; spreadsheets and databases that gave us more insight into the business but didn’t necessarily foot to the official financials.”

Graham and his team at Peloton were laser-focused on operational data, things like customer acquisition cost (CAC), monthly recurring revenue (MRR), and lifetime value (LTV), none of which could be tracked in Quickbooks. 

“We had a homegrown e-commerce system for better or for worse,” explained Graham. “And we had an AWS Redshift data warehouse that could ingest all the data and various other external systems that would be aggregated via spreadsheets, but it would always go in different directions. The data would be pulled together by different groups of analysts, maybe by an FP&A, maybe by business intelligence. And then it would go to the accountants who were sort of at the end of the queue. That meant no decisions were really made based on what the accountants did.”

Moving Off QuickBooks Was “A Painful Experience”

That’s when Graham had the idea to move off of QuickBooks to NetSuite. The hope was to be able to bring in all of this operational data from disparate systems as well as the historical accounting data from QuickBooks into one centralized system that also had all the necessary internal controls to be Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliant to eventually take Peloton public.

“It was a lengthy process and the business was complicated,” said Graham. “And so the NetSuite team rightly told us that we’re going to need to work with some good implementation consultants. And then that got complicated, and we realized we now needed people to manage the implementation consultants. So we hired enterprise IT, and then enterprise IT said this was fairly complicated and we were going to need other consultants as well. And it very quickly turned into this big hairy operation just to get us onto NetSuite. Meanwhile, none of this really addressed the core underlying problems of clarity, of getting the books closed in a timely manner.”

Although he noted that many other companies have found success using NetSuite, Graham confessed that it was a mismatch for the complexity, newness, and exponential growth of the business. And ultimately, after a multi-year migration effort, the team at Peloton ended up scaling down the scope of the ERP to just the financial reporting side of the business.

Reflecting on what he calls a ‘painful experience with a less-than-ideal end result’, Graham started to ask the question: What if there was a better approach entirely?

Staying on QuickBooks Regardless of Future Business Growth 

“What if there was an easy system that could check the box for Sarbanes-Oxley requirements, that could help get the close process wrangled, that could be a grown-up real repository that has data, that could support better reporting to actually support the business coming out of the GL, but didn’t try to be the end all operational system?” thought Graham. “And ultimately, what if that software wouldn’t require a migration and could sort of handle that automatically?”

And that brings us to Avise. It’s common knowledge that QuickBooks or Xero (or whatever GL software you use) has its limitations and that once you get to a certain size your only real option is to switch to an ERP system. But Avise solves the issues that QuickBooks simply can’t. 

Avise plugs directly into QuickBooks via the API to consolidate data across multiple entities within the General Ledger. It allows companies to get OpEx reports and speed up month-end close with task management, collaboration, and the ability to automate accrual, deferred revenue and fixed asset schedules. It also does flux analysis to assist in forecasting, budgeting, and maintaining corporate integrity. 

This allows fast-growing companies to spend less time on accounting busy work and more time on meaningful business growth, stay SOX compliant, and go public without spending time and resources on a large and costly ERP migration.

To learn more about how Avise can help you extend the life of your GL software, head over to earmarkcpe.promo/avise.

You can check out more episodes of the Earmark Podcast here. And if you’d like to find out how you can earn free CPE credits for listening to this episode and others, visit earmarkcpe.com to download the app today.

Welcome ACPEN to Earmark CPE

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We’re pleased to partner with Accounting CPE Network (ACPEN) to bring select premium courses to the Earmark CPE app! ACPEN is the largest provider of streaming video webinars for continuing education for CPAs in the United States.

The first course is “Single Audit Nuts and Bolts,” by Frank Crawford and Drummond Kahn. You can earn 1 governmental auditing credit for this premium course (available for an additional fee) on Earmark CPE.

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