Silverfin roll out and development focus

We are initially focusing our work on (and you may appreciate from this document the work that is involved) is on the 5,000+ non audit, non-specialist sector clients that we prepare accounts for. This will give us a basic platform that we can then adapt for other clients. Specifically:

1. Audit clients – it makes sense if possible that we generally use one platform for accounts production, and we are aware that some staff work on both audit and non-audit clients. As such, we will work to assess the ability to use Silverfin for audit clients over the next couple of months. This will be slightly complicated by the fact that Silverfin itself generates what we would term Lead Schedules (called Reconciliations in Silverfin) and we are unsure as to how this would work in practice with Pro Audit, but will progress this shortly.
2. Sector specialisms – This will affect the schedules used within Silverfin (e.g. herd stock schedule for farmers), the accounts produced (esp benchmarking data) as well as the underlying Chart of Accounts.
   1. Accounts – Silverfin comes preloaded with limited company (FRS 102/102 1A/105/filleted), sole trade and partnerships (including LLPs shortly). We will include, within these templates, dormant companies and simplified Income & Expenditure accounts for sole traders. We then plan to work with Silverfin on more complex cases as well as the ability to include benchmarking data – see below. We are also looking at Trusts here, although that may take some more time given their individual reporting requirements.
   2. Schedules – As for financial accounts, companies, sole traders and partnerships all have tailored work schedules and farmers are currently being developed jointly with JC. LLPs will be released in line with the accounts. 
   3. Chart of Accounts - Silverfin contains one unified Chart of Accounts into which it reads client data (but importantly, whilst still maintaining the client nominal account number and client code description, so each client code can be accessed, journaled and analysed). We can modify this CoA ourselves and it should therefore be possible to facilitate some of the benchmarking we do for certain client types – Doctors, Farmers, Hotels, etc. We have started this by getting the right CoA overall structure, so if you are aware of another sector for which we undertake additional analysis that the client values (and pays us for), please contact us. We are then focusing on Farmers and Doctors.

Therefore for the short term, there are a number of other clients that prepare accounts that we are not producing within Silverfin:

1. Companies that need an audit
2. Consolidated accounts
3. Farming clients and LLPs (although these are due to be completed shortly)
4. Specialist sectors such as charities, academies and doctors and specific complexities such as partnerships that own property and need a Property Capital accounts or revaluation line (this last one being addressed urgently).
5. Dormant companies that file DCA form AA02. Where a dormant company still needs to produce accounts, there is this option in Workflow 3: General Settings reconciliation, where you can input the date of dormancy.
6.  Complex accounts (this will be judgemental but we can use large trusts here as an example.

For these we will continue to DAPA/DAP, although for many we can still use Silverfin for the access to clients data and working papers and then export to DAPA/DAP (see here for more details).