Anyone coordinate regularly with accountants abroad? How do you manage it?
CrossBorderCFO
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Bit of a process question rather than anything technical.
Some cross-border work is moving under me at the moment, and I've been doing walkthroughs of how we currently handle communication with local accountants in Italy, France and a few other countries. It's not great, everyone's doing their best in English, but things get lost. Terms get used slightly differently locally, a figure or treatment gets described in a way that doesn't quite match what we'd expect, and a lot of it ends up as a long email chain that nobody could easily explain to an auditor afterwards.
Trying to work out whether this is just normal and everyone copes the same way, or whether other firms have actually got a decent system for it.
- Anyone got bilingual staff specifically for this, or does it fall to whoever happens to speak the language?
- Any tools beyond Google Translate or DeepL that actually help with the accounting side of it?
- Is it the language that's the problem, or more that local rules and terminology don't map cleanly onto what you're used to?
- Has it ever genuinely caused an issue, something that came up in an audit or a dispute?
Would be good to hear how others handle it day to day. Thanks!
Some cross-border work is moving under me at the moment, and I've been doing walkthroughs of how we currently handle communication with local accountants in Italy, France and a few other countries. It's not great, everyone's doing their best in English, but things get lost. Terms get used slightly differently locally, a figure or treatment gets described in a way that doesn't quite match what we'd expect, and a lot of it ends up as a long email chain that nobody could easily explain to an auditor afterwards.
Trying to work out whether this is just normal and everyone copes the same way, or whether other firms have actually got a decent system for it.
- Anyone got bilingual staff specifically for this, or does it fall to whoever happens to speak the language?
- Any tools beyond Google Translate or DeepL that actually help with the accounting side of it?
- Is it the language that's the problem, or more that local rules and terminology don't map cleanly onto what you're used to?
- Has it ever genuinely caused an issue, something that came up in an audit or a dispute?
Would be good to hear how others handle it day to day. Thanks!
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