-
Business Consulting
Our Consulting team guarantees quick turnarounds, lower partner-to-staff ratio than most and superior results delivered on a range of services.
-
Business Risk Services
Our Business Risk Services team deliver practical and pragmatic solutions that support clients in growing and protecting the inherent value of their businesses.
-
Corporate Finance
Our experienced Corporate Finance team has provided a range of transaction, valuation, deal advisory and restructuring services to clients for the past two decades.
-
Digital Risk
Our Digital Risk team offer advisory and consulting solutions that give our clients peace of mind, clear value for money and an enhanced ability to react to cyber attacks.
-
Digital Transformation
Our Digital Transformation team work with business leaders to deliver efficient digital strategies and operating models that provide new or enhanced capabilities.
-
Forensic and Investigation Services
Our Forensic and Investigation Services team have targeted solutions to solve difficult challenges - making the difference between finding the truth or being left in the dark.
-
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) is a goal setting framework that helps teams, individuals and organisations set and track measurable goals.
-
People and Change Consulting
Our People & Change Consulting team help clients adapt to the changing nature of the workforce - how they attract, retain, engage, develop, deploy and lead their people.
-
Restructuring
Grant Thornton is Ireland’s leading provider of insolvency and corporate recovery solutions.
-
Outsourced Payroll
Our outsourced payroll teams become your dedicated payroll department, aiming to process your payroll in the most cost effective and compliant manner.
-
Outsourcing
Grant Thornton's reliable and cost-effective outsourcing services help you streamline your business operations by taking care of your workload.
-
Audit and Accounting Advisory
Our Audit and Accounting Advisory team takes the headache out of multi-jurisdictional audit compliance requirements as well as technical compliance with accounting standards and legislation for clients.
-
Business Process Outsourcing
Grant Thornton’s Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) team serves the needs of rapidly growing mid-tier multinationals operating out of Ireland and other hubs through the provision of services across the full range of finance functions.
-
Flexible People Solutions
At Grant Thornton, our Financial Accounting and Advisory Services (FAAS) department have a dedicated team that help finance functions maximise efficiency.
-
Global Compliance & Reporting Solutions
Our Global Compliance & Reporting Solutions service offering covers a full suite of compliance services including financial statement preparation and related filings, dual bookkeeping, direct and indirect tax, statistical returns and payroll.
-
Global Payroll Solutions
At Grant Thornton, we meet the challenges of our clients. Our Global payroll compliance service offering is tailored to meet all your payroll requirements through a single point of contact.
-
Actuarial
Our Actuarial team provides a comprehensive range of services to our insurance clients. From regulatory support for compliance to delivering specialist expertise in insurance & reinsurance.
-
Data Analytics
Our team helps to unlock the potential of data analytics within your organisation, allowing you to be more innovative, efficient and customer-centric than ever before.
-
Digital and Fintech
Our FinTech team are experts in technology and financial services and have a long track record of helping companies achieve sustained advantage.
-
Digital Risk
Our Digital Risk team offer advisory and consulting solutions that give our clients peace of mind, clear value for money and an enhanced ability to react to cyber attacks.
-
Financial Services Audit
Our Financial Services Audit team offers expertise and knowledge along with a horizontal approach to solving clients’ problems and queries.
-
Financial Services Consulting
We work closely with clients to understand their strategy and benchmark their performance against the very best international standards.
-
Financial Services Tax
Grant Thornton Ireland has a team of over 100 tax professionals providing advice to a diverse range of clients in the Financial Services sector.
-
FS Business Risk Services
Our FS Business Risk team have real experience of the financial services sector, through working within regulatory bodies or holding leadership positions in Risk, Compliance and Internal Audit functions.
-
Grant Thornton Pensioneer Trustees Limited
The Grant Thornton Pensioneer Trustee service can offer business owners, directors and employees the opportunity to manage their own retirement choices with full transparency.
-
Pension Audit
The Grant Thornton Pension Audit team has vast experience in managing schemes and preparing annual reports on them for clients.
-
Prudential Risk
Our industry leading Prudential Risk team works with clients on a range of areas including regulatory reporting, regulatory authorisations, on-site investigations and data quality assurance.
-
Quantitative Risk
Our Quantitative Risk team members bring a wide range of experience with many of them having backgrounds in banking, investment markets, regulation, professional practice, and academia.
-
Sustainability desk
We recognise that businesses are operating at different levels of maturity when it comes to sustainability, and pride ourselves on working with our clients to develop bespoke solutions to their needs.
-
Financial Accounting and Advisory Services (FAAS)
Our Financial Accounting and Advisory Services (FAAS) team designs and implements creative solutions for organisations expanding into new markets or undertaking functional financial transformations.
-
Grant Thornton Financial Counselling
Grant Thornton Financial Counselling (GTFC) comprises a team of highly qualified professionals who offer financial advice to individuals and corporates across a range of areas including savings, investments, pension planning, and inheritance and succession planning.
-
Inheritance Planning
Our services on Inheritance Planning mirror those on Succession Planning whereby the foundations of the plan are derived from meaningful conversations with those that wish to pass on or protect their asset base.
-
Personal Tax Compliance & Planning
The Grant Thornton Personal Tax team helps clients remain compliant and up to date with all of their tax obligations whilst ensuring that they are solutions driven and manage their finances in the most tax efficient way possible.
-
Succession Planning
We have extensive experience guiding our clients successfully through the succession process. This involves advice on both the qualitative and quantitative aspects of the process. While there is a business at the core of each succession plan we advise on, it is all predicated on understanding the people and their respective wishes.
-
Company Secretarial
Grant Thornton’s Company Secretarial team contains qualified Company Secretaries. Clients are assured that they will meet all of their obligations under the Companies Acts and other relevant legislation and regulations.
-
Corporation Tax
Our Corporation Tax team is made up of more than 40 highly experienced senior partners and directors who work directly with a wide range of domestic, international, and financial services clients. We place a strong emphasis on direct service to clients and we pride ourselves on the close personal relationships we build and the deep understanding of their businesses we develop
-
Employer Solutions
Attracting and retaining key talent, managing employment costs and ensuring compliance with complex tax rules presents one of the most serious challenges today for many businesses. You need to ensure that your business complies with increasingly complex tax legislation and can adapt to updated Revenue guidance in a cost-effective way and we are here to help.
-
Financial Services Tax
The Grant Thornton team is made up of experts who are fully up to date in terms of changing and evolving tax legislation. This is combined with industry expertise and an in-depth knowledge of the evolving financial services regulatory landscape.
-
Global Mobility Services
Grant Thornton Ireland offer a different approach to managing global mobility. We have brought together specialists from our tax, global payroll, people and change and financial accounting teams across Ireland and Northern Ireland, while drawing on the knowledge and insights of our global network of over 143 offices of mobility professionals to provide you with a holistic approach to managing global mobility.
-
International Tax
We develop close relationships with clients in order to gain a deep understanding of their businesses to ensure they make the right operational decisions. The wrong decision on how a company sells into a new market or establishes a new subsidiary can have major tax implications.
-
Tax Advisory
The Grant Thornton Tax Advisory team blends commercial experience and knowledge with tax expertise to advise clients on the full range of transactions including sales, mergers, restructurings and succession planning.
-
Tax Incentives
Our Tax Incentives team help clients access vital cash funding and tax incentives to enable them to achieve their growth ambition.
-
Transfer Pricing
Our Transfer Pricing team has extensive experience across all industries. They can assist clients in overcoming challenges and deliver sector specific, sustainable solutions.
-
VAT
Grant Thornton’s team of indirect tax specialists helps a range of clients across a variety of sectors including pharmaceuticals, financial services, construction and property and food to navigate these complexities.
-
Real Estate Tax Advisory
The Irish real estate market has experienced considerable change in recent years. This has resulted in the emergence of a number of challenges for investors, but has also brought about significant opportunities. With this in mind, taxation is now more than ever one of the key factors for real estate investors when appraising investments, financing methods and development structuring.
By: Joseph Masterson, Trainee in Financial Accounting and Advisory Services
Introduction
No one could have foreseen how exactly the first year of the new decade would start and there is always an inherent level of uncertainty when discussing things to do with the future. For businesses and professional’s, uncertainty leads to risk, Accountancy as an industry by its very nature, is exceptionally risk averse. Uncertainty makes it difficult to chart a course for businesses and professionals and that is why it is so disliked. No truly successful business is built on consistently being on the back foot and reacting to change instead of being the ones to drive it.
What we might expect
It is impossible to discuss any level of changes that may be anticipated in the coming decade without mentioning the most significant of them all, technology. It is an ever growing part of our everyday lives and this is even truer for businesses where it provides a competitive edge for companies. Even those thought of as more traditional goods and service providers have felt its impact on their way of doing business, further heightened by Covid-19 implications. Though there has always been much speculation around the extent that technology would impact accounting it would be foolish not to acknowledge that the changes in the coming decade will be more significant than those in the last. If technological developments were graphed, the line it would trace would be curved upwards rather than a straight line, meaning that the more advances we make the faster technology develops and this will certainly apply to its implementations in the workplace. If this is still somewhat unclear, then think of it this way. For the majority of human history before 1886, when the first modern car was invented, horses and carts were the primary means of transport up to that point and yet 80 years later it was possible to land on the moon. It is likely however, that despite the many changes we saw in the previous decade regarding technology and the accountant, these will lead to even more in the coming decade. Though that is not to say these developments will be dramatic and immediately impactful. Rather a gradual development.
Several predictions have already been made regarding accountancy in the coming decade. These include predictions such as increased use of smart technologies replacing more traditional means of work and cloud software, further supporting the trend of outsourcing services. Increased intergovernmental tax action on regulations and disclosure rules and a focus on standardising accounting practises internationally are also predicted. A shift in stakeholder focus regarding corporate social responsibility (CSR) in businesses so that they will be considered alongside general economic issues in importance is also anticipated.
In a recent Journal of Accountancy[1] article from December 1st 2019, the possibility of robotic process automation (RPA) becoming increasingly integrated in the profession is discussed. RPA’s, are a form of AI/smart technology that contrast to traditional workflow automation tools in that they do not run off a set script that a programmer has given them to perform tasks but rather learn from watching the user perform the task on their user interface and are capable of using multiple applications in repeating a process. The use of AI in accounting has been something widely speculated for many years. In a 2016 report by ICAS, further developments in the field of AI were predicted to lead to a reduction in the number of graduate recruits for accounting firms by 2020, this has not proven to be the case though the initial steps towards it’s integration may be attempted within the decade they are equally unlikely to reduce the level of graduates amongst firms.
Furthermore, 5G and Wi-Fi 6 networks are both anticipated within the next 2 years and are expected to enable RPA’s adaption. 5G technology allows data transfer up to 100 times faster than current 4G with little to no lag time, allowing for real-time data transfer. Wi-Fi 6 allows for data transfer three times faster than current Wi-Fi 5 and for more devices to be connected to a single network. Given the significantly increased level of data transfer these technologies can enable. This in turn helps power deep learning for AI bots to automate large amounts of repetitive accounting work, thus free more time for accountants to focus on their advisory role to clients.
Impact on Key Service Lines
Auditing service line
Technology, such as computer assisted auditing technologies (CAATS) have streamlined many of the more routine tasks for auditors and will continue to do so into the coming decade. For auditors, this means they may begin to see the implementation of RPA’s taking over from CAAT’s, as a means to this end. With CAATS’s, part of an auditor’s job changed to monitoring such systems, alongside more hands on auditing work carried out in person. As technology develops further and with additional strides being made with use of RPA’s, the number of auditing tasks that become fully automated will similarly grow. Auditors may find themselves working alongside such software, where they are implemented, in a co-worker capacity when performing tasks rather than monitoring them.
With technology enabling increasingly more remote communication, auditors may find their level of interaction with clients declining, though not outright disappearing, thereby enabling auditors to work with clients from an even larger geographical base. However certain audit tasks simply require direct interactions, such as obtaining reasonable assurance over client assertions where data from auditing systems may contradict such.
Financial Accounting service line
Technology has played a significant role in changing the work of financial accountants. It is now quicker for clients to produce information required to create financial statements. It has also streamlined the recording of this information, thereby making it easier to trace through the various books and ledgers. Future developments may allow entirely automated production of final statements and movement towards a global accounting standard will facilitate this. The work of a financial accountant will adapt towards offering external checks on financial statements, ensuring presented statements include the correct checks, balances and formatting before presentation to auditors.
This frees up accountants to expand into advisory roles for those clients for whom they worked on financial statements. Many accountants currently find themselves already fulfilling this role and it will see the largest growth as a service in the coming decade. Advisory services are the least impacted by technological developments, relying predominantly upon an accountants own competencies and financial knowledge to provide advice, rather than what data an automated system produces. Such systems however will change how the information used in forming the basis of their advice is received and facilitate the ability to offer real-time, rapid responses to client’s needs as they emerge.
Conclusion
The coming decade will see the continued fruition of changes that have already taken root reach their full potential and predictions on future changes will show their initial signs of emerging and becoming part of the fabric of the profession. Technology will continue to be a growing factor to consider, playing an increasingly significant part in the work of accountants. Developments will predominantly focus on the automation of simpler and more repetitive tasks initially before expanding into increasingly more complex and advanced roles. This thereby frees time for accountants to focus on developing their roles as trusted business advisors. Within this role, accountants will have to go from tech competent to tech savvy as clients become increasingly reliant on smart technology, functioning as both financial and business tech advisors.
Client engagements will focus further on building lasting business relationships, akin to partnerships, in a path towards becoming trusted advisors. This will become the unique selling point for many firms. Overall it is clear that whatever changes emerge, accountants must remain committed to being adaptable, flexible, open and pro-active to change.
This article first appeared in Accounting Ireland
[1] https://www.journalofaccountancy.com/issues/2019/dec/robotic-process-automation-for-tax.html