“That would be kind of crazy, whomever been our controller has to be an employee of us and has to be in-house, anything different would be absurd…”

Well, that is not the way some of our customers think nowadays. It happens to be that start-ups are greatly focused on growth, and they are willing to pay or afford almost any cost in exchange of such growth. In such conditions, they may take risks bigger than other companies would, and are particularly, much more creative than other companies.

In this creativity scenario, they may think of having a strong figure in charge of certain duties, in this case, the controllership work, either an employee or not, they are only looking for the quality of the outcome. Controllership is a broad activity within the company so, some of its activities may be outsourced, i.e., ensuring quality of financial figures, adherence to IFRS and tax fulfilment among other.

What do we do? We do execute accounting (meaning recording transactions); review accounting records (out of an ERP); we analyse specific items to ensure compliance to IFRS, we can book and follow up; we calculate taxes and determine amounts to be shown in the corresponding tax return or we can supervise calculations, we face auditors in the yearly process, and many other duties. We are the controller for some of our customers!!

We have been successful in these activities. We have walked the way to become a unicorn and, will do it again!

Abraham Arcos, partner at Auren México