Financial statement audits and reviews that hold up under scrutiny.

A statutory audit is an independent examination of a company's financial statements, performed by a licensed CPA firm and required by law, contract, or regulation. The word "statutory" simply means a statute or rule mandates it, rather than the owners choosing it voluntarily. The auditor gathers evidence, tests the numbers, and then issues a formal opinion on whether the financial statements present fairly, in all material respects, the company's position and results under the applicable framework.

That framework matters. In the United States, most statements follow US GAAP; internationally, many follow IFRS. The auditor measures your reporting against the framework that applies to you, not a generic checklist. The opinion at the front of the report is the whole point: it tells a reader who was not in the room whether they can trust the figures on the pages that follow.

People often blur three very different services together. A financial statement audit delivers the highest level of assurance a CPA offers. A review delivers a middle tier. A compilation delivers none. Knowing which one you actually need, and which one your lender or regulator is demanding, saves you both money and a rejected filing. We help you get that call right before any work starts.

Almost no company audits its books for fun. Someone outside the business asks for assurance, and the request usually arrives with a deadline. A few situations drive most of the demand:

• Lenders and banks. Credit agreements frequently include a covenant requiring audited or reviewed statements within a set number of days after year-end. Miss it and you risk a technical default, even when the business is healthy.
• Investors and acquirers. Venture and private equity investors often require audited statements before a round closes, and buyers want them during diligence. Clean, independent numbers move a deal faster and protect your valuation.
• Boards and owners. Directors carry a fiduciary duty, and an independent audit gives them assurance that management's reporting is sound. Absentee owners rely on the same comfort.
• Regulators and statutory filings. Many jurisdictions require companies above a size threshold, or in a regulated sector, to file audited statements each year. Subsidiaries of foreign parents often face a local statutory audit regardless of size.

If any of these apply, start earlier than feels necessary. Assurance work depends on the quality of your records, and the tighter your deadline, the more a rushed close costs you. Booking the engagement well before year-end lets us plan the timing, agree the scope, and flag problems while you can still fix them cleanly.

For an audit, you receive a complete set of financial statements with our independent auditor's report and opinion, along with the notes that explain your accounting. You also get a management letter when we spot control or process weaknesses worth fixing, plus the required communications to those charged with governance. For a review, you receive the statements and a review report describing the limited assurance we provide. A compilation gives you presentable statements and a report stating plainly that we did not audit or review them.

Timing depends far more on your records than on our calendar. When your books are closed and your reconciliations are clean, audit fieldwork commonly runs 4 to 8 weeks, longer for groups with multiple entities or currencies. A review is quicker because the procedures are lighter. The single biggest delay we see is a slow or messy close, so the readiness of your accounting team drives the schedule as much as anything we do. We plan around your filing deadline and work backward from it.

FinAudit CPA is a licensed US CPA firm, and independence is not a slogan for us. We do not sell you the bookkeeping and then audit our own work, because an auditor who checks their own numbers is no auditor at all. That separation is exactly what gives your report its value when a lender, an investor, or a regulator reads the opinion and decides whether to rely on it.

You also get senior attention that stays on your file, fixed scope you can budget around, and a team that reads both your controls and your numbers with equal fluency. For international and statutory work, we are direct with you: we deliver engagements ourselves where we are licensed to do so, and we work through our professional network in other jurisdictions rather than pretend we hold licenses we do not. When your audit touches revenue recognition, a coming transaction, or a control environment under review, we connect it to the wider advisory work so you are not paying separate firms to learn the same business twice.