Working paper preparation

A schedule that survives a phone call

The real test of a UAE working paper set is whether every figure on it traces back to the trial balance without anyone needing to explain it out loud. Lead schedules for cash, debtors, creditors, fixed assets and equity each show the opening position, the year's movement, and the closing balance, cross-referenced to source detail rather than typed from memory.

Provisions, accruals and lease liabilities each get their own roll-forward under IFRS, since the movement between opening and closing is usually the first thing a reviewer asks about.

Comments come back; the file has to keep up

A licensed audit firm almost never accepts a first draft as final. When review comments land, we update the schedule they point to, keep the earlier version in a dated log rather than overwriting it, and note why the number changed. That log answers the question the next reviewer asks: why this figure differs from the last draft they saw.

A dedicated schedule for qualifying income

A Qualifying Free Zone Person's 0% rate on qualifying income rests on a clean split from anything earned on the mainland. We build that split as its own working paper, tied to the same trial balance as every other schedule, rather than a side spreadsheet an auditor or the Federal Tax Authority cannot trace back to the books.

Format follows whoever is reading it

Where your audit firm has its own template, we build inside it. Where it does not, we keep one internal format across the whole set, with file names and version numbers that make the current draft obvious at a glance.

This work follows on from audit-ready books and often leads into internal controls documentation once a reviewer wants to see how a control is actually evidenced, not only what the resulting number is.