Business advisors can offer a variety of services to assist you in running your business more smoothly, especially when dealing with financial and operational performance.
Grant Thornton LLP, the U.S. member firm of Grant Thornton International, is a national audit, tax and business advisory organization with 50 offices across the country. Locally, the Cleveland office employs approximately 125 professionals, including 13 partners who serve both public and private clients, providing a variety of accounting, assurance, tax and business advisory services.
Grant Thornton LLP offers an array of risk and operational improvement services to businesses across numerous industries. "Our services are very scalable to any company," says Norbert Trocki, principal and practice leader of the Business Advisory Services (BAS) practice of Grant Thornton LLP's Cleveland office. "We're just as comfortable working with large corporations as we are small businesses."
The BAS practice assists organizations in identifying risks, implementing and assessing internal controls and improving operational effectiveness.
"When dealing with risk assessment issues, we'll meet with the key stakeholders of the organization to determine its overall effectiveness," says Trocki. "Then, we create a risk profile to develop a game plan to improve the organization's control structures. It's important to have an internal audit function in place to ensure that your controls, policies and procedures are effective and operating as planned [in order to] identify other opportunities for development."
A business advisor also can evaluate the effectiveness of your organization's business operations and information technology system and, if needed, he or she can assist in developing and implementing a new system. "Obviously you don't want to spend a quarter-million dollars on a new computer system if you only have 10 employees in your office," says Trocki.
The goal is to create a strongly controlled environment that is scalable to the size of the organization," he says. "We look at a company's current environment to ensure it's utilizing its automated systems, controls and processes effectively," Trocki adds.
To create this controlled environment, Trocki believes it's crucial that an organization adopt an internal control framework such as COSO (Committee of Sponsoring Organizations) to use as a blueprint for the development of its internal control structure. In addition, many organizations use the Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology (CobiT) as their set of best practices. For example, CobiT provides IT financial executives with a set of measures, indicators and best practices to develop appropriate governance and control within the organization.
Whether implementing or assessing internal controls, Sarbanes-Oxley or implementing a new computer system, Grant Thornton's insightful, experienced professionals can add value to your business and assist with business-advisory service needs.
Contact Norbert Trocki at (216) 858-3643 or visit
www.grantthornton.com.