In this RSM review, we’ll dig into the company’s background and go into the various services being offered. Is RSM a good consulting firm? Let’s find out.
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Table of Contents
RSM History
RSM is a global network of audit, tax, and consulting experts. After going by LHBD in 1964, LRRD in 1974, and DRM in 1979, the network settled on its current moniker in 1993. The initial enterprises that would come to define the RSM network were founded in the 19th century.
RSM has a significant international footprint, with member firms in more than 120 countries and a visibility in the top 40 main business centers across the world. The company’s main office may be found at 50 Cannon Street, London. Each accounting and consulting firm that is part of the RSM network is completely autonomous and functions independently.
RSM provides end-to-end guidance on a wide range of matters, including audit and assurance, consultancy, tax, risk advisory, IFRS, restructuring, transactions, and financial advisory services. Member firms of RSM also offer services such as wealth management, IT consulting, legal counseling, forensic accounting, and human resource consulting, in addition to the aforementioned.
Over 48,000 professionals work at RSM’s 830 offices in America, Europe, Middle East, Africa, and Asia Pacific.
RSM Services
Audit and Assurance
RSM offers global audit services to internationally engaged groups, complying to various assurance standards.
RSM businesses certified with the PCAOB ensure that US listed corporations’ audited accounts recognize their work. While taking local regulations into account, their audit technique is global.
RSM emphasizes audit quality and professional standards as a Forum of Firms member. The network certifies that statutory accounts comply with accounting and regulatory standards when auditing them.
RSM meets with management to discuss audit results to improve compliance and performance. Its audit teams focus on certain sectors and industries to better understand client issues.
While adherence to international and national standards is crucial, RSM’s audit methodology offers flexibility to align the audit approach with client needs and circumstances. In addition to financial statement audits, the network offers a variety of assurance services to boost business reporting and disclosure credibility.
International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) professionals at RSM understand IFRS and its effects on local markets. These professionals assist companies with complicated IFRS issues.
IFRS knowledge is crucial for international expansion, which often involves cross-border transactions, loan finance, private equity agreements, and capital raising.
RSM’s IFRS services include conversion projects, due diligence in an IFRS environment, valuations of business combinations, advice on share option plans, audit of IFRS financial statements, reconciliations between IFRS and other GAAPs, training, technical assistance, and assistance in preparing and implementing IFRS accounting manuals.
Consulting
RSM firms offer specialized consulting services to help organizations in the short-, intermediate-, and long-term. Their approach is collaborative; after learning about the company’s unique difficulties, they call on specialists from their extensive network to provide individualized consultancy services.
If a client is interested in maximizing growth potential, overcoming obstacles with creative approaches, or better understanding and controlling risks, RSM will work closely with them to develop solutions that do just that.
Experts at RSM can help finance leaders and CFOs in many different ways, including by improving cost efficiency, streamlining processes, analyzing data, and creating value, growth, and transformation.
On top of aiding in sustainable growth, they assist organizations in improving their human resources, streamlining their procedures, and creating intelligent operating models. RSM also aids its customers in dealing with complexity, advising them on how to create safe and sustainable methods of expansion. Acquisitions, strategic alliances, capital raising, and reorganizations are just few of the many areas in which they offer advice.
Access to RSM’s in-house tech teams, who combine business understanding with software experience to offer technology-based solutions, is available in addition to the network’s consulting skills. Services include business continuity planning, website creation, compliance, risk advice, IT security, and controls, as well as information systems design, data management, and integration.
Digital Services
Data analytics consulting is a service provided by RSM, and it helps businesses make better use of their data and turn it into an asset. Experts on their team evaluate, link, and integrate customer data utilizing many platforms to provide one trustworthy database for use across the company. Clients are thus enabled to draw useful conclusions and make sound business decisions based on reliable information.
The benefits of data analytics are manifold, but many companies struggle to realize its full potential due to issues with data governance, insufficient capabilities, and an excessive reliance on spreadsheets or disconnected systems.
RSM’s managed services framework includes everything from accounting and payroll to compliance and analytics as well as information technology solutions, and it’s designed to fill this need. These services are meant to free up customer time and energy from mundane administrative tasks so they may concentrate on more important strategic goals.
RSM employs cutting-edge IT infrastructure to provide clients with flexible, scalable, and accurate digital solutions. Clients who deal with RSM benefit from the firm’s extensive resources and the ability to adapt to fluctuating domestic and worldwide demand. This method uses a variable cost model to replace the fixed costs often associated with internal operations or functions.
Financial Due Diligence
RSM provides a global array of services to help clients assess the risks and opportunities of proposed deals. These services include financial, tax, and broader analyses. They want their clients to make well-informed judgments and come out on the other end of negotiations with the best possible terms.
Performing financial due diligence is critical in determining if a deal should move forward and can greatly increase the likelihood of attaining the transaction’s goals. In addition, the due diligence process aids in transaction structure and sets clients up for success in negotiations.
Expert professionals from RSM’s specialized teams provide due diligence services to clients like investors, banks, private equity firms, corporate acquirers, and vendors. By conducting vendor assist or vendor due diligence, RSM can help sellers discover problems before buyers use them to negotiate lower prices.
Due diligence for business transactions is an area in which RSM excels. Financial due diligence, advise on sale and purchase agreements, completion accounts, locked boxes, due diligence on working capital, review of completion accounts, and help after the deal are all examples.
The network’s goal is to assist clients throughout the whole transaction process by using their knowledge and individualized services to ensure accurate financial analysis, effective deal structuring, and trouble-free follow-up.
Legal Services
The legal service at RSM is staffed by a group of experts with strong credentials in both technical knowledge and the ability to apply sound judgment to solve problems. Their entrepreneurial spirit, with an emphasis on the middle market, set them apart from more conventional law firms and competitors. They can guide businesses through incorporation, funding, growth, joint ventures, and acquisitions.
When working on client projects, RSM can draw on the knowledge of its tax and financial professionals as well as the skills of its human resources and labor practitioners.
In addition, many RSM member firms employ attorneys who are widely regarded as among the best in their respective fields; these attorneys specialize in things like pre-litigation and litigation legal services related to French tax disputes, as well as English mergers and acquisitions, black economic transformation services in South Africa, specialist German inheritance law, and Italian real estate and banking services, among other things.
RSM’s legal service shines in part because of the firm’s dedication to providing individualized attention to business owners in the middle market. Legal counsel from RSM is available for various corporate and business needs, including incorporation, financing, development possibilities, litigation, credit recovery, and reorganization.
Particular attention is paid to mergers and acquisitions, with the team being prepared to assist customers at every level of the transaction, from the initial stages of exploring potential targets through the final stages of integrating the two businesses.
Outsourcing
RSM provides extensive outsourcing services to address the secretarial and administrative requirements of enterprises. Such services are based on in-depth familiarity with both domestic and international regulations and customs.
RSM’s solutions are designed to make accounting and bookkeeping more efficient so that businesses can focus on what they do best while the company handles the ancillary responsibilities.
RSM is prepared to meet any business outsourcing difficulty head-on thanks to its competent and seasoned team of experts in the field. Throughout, RSM keeps lines of communication open and transparent, giving brief but consistent updates. This keeps customers updated on the progress of their administrative services.
The RSM network provide various outsourcing services to non-insurance customers. Bookkeeping, preparing budgets, management accounts, and financial analyses, providing temporary or part-time accounting assistance, drafting accounting manuals, payroll services, corporate secretarial services, forming new legal entities, keeping minutes and other legal documents, serving as a non-executive director, and preparing legal documents are all examples of the services that fall under this category.
Outsourcing to RSM allows firms to save time and money on routine administrative chores while taking use of the knowledge and resources of a worldwide partner.
Restructuring
When clients encounter typical business problems, they can turn to RSM for helpful support. For instance, they can help you optimize results in formal insolvency situations, secure suitable funding solutions, identify and recover assets in contentious insolvency cases, and navigate accelerate.
They are also skilled at implementing effective turnaround strategies, streamlining corporate structures to better manage risk, evaluating the strength of defined benefit pension covenants, keeping an eye on emerging financial risks, and protecting the value of distressed real estate projects.
RSM collaborates closely with customers to tackle these issues and develop workable solutions using their extensive expertise. The network offers its clients the guidance and support they need to overcome obstacles and achieve their goals, whether that be developing turnaround strategies to revitalize struggling businesses, streamlining corporate structures for improved risk management, or maximizing value in complex insolvency scenarios.
Because of their experience and breadth of offerings, businesses may rely on them as an ally when dealing with difficult challenges.
Risk Advisory
RSM provides numerous services to organizations in order to reduce their vulnerability to risk and increase the value they provide to their stakeholders. They comprehend corporate threats including the global banking crisis and rising cybercrime. As systems and processes evolve, RSM is there to lend assistance and advice to guarantee that risks are being managed proactively.
Their internal auditors collaborate closely with their customers to learn about their company goals and objectives, as well as the forces that influence those goals, and to grasp how all of this is turned into actionable steps and procedures. They provide useful insights to stakeholders by doing objective analyses of the quality and efficiency of the company’s control environment.
Where RSM’s customers have found room for improvement, the firm has worked together to implement those recommendations and meet their goals.
Various forms of advice and help are available through RSM’s risk management services. They assist management teams in creating effective and secure internal control systems by providing advice on the development of internal controls that improve the control environment. They also help with change management by outlining steps to take while implementing a new policy or procedure, as well as addressing other key operational risks.
Through the provision of training and skill development for workers, RSM helps businesses make the change from inefficient to productive working methods.
Risk managers at RSM also have experience with things like forensic accounting and investigation services. With their help, their clients can successfully face criminal prosecution, civil recovery, or disciplinary action wherever in the world. They provide both proactive and reactive solutions to sophisticated fraud-related issues, including as fraud risk reduction and prevention, money laundering, whistleblower referrals, theft, surveillance, and corruption.
Their forensic accounting teams do more than just crunch numbers; they take into account the practical implications for businesses and offer objective, understandable assessments. To businesses and professionals all across the world, they provide forensic accounting services tailored to their specific needs.
Businesses can protect their operations, guarantee compliance, and increase their value proposition to stakeholders all with the help of RSM’s risk management services, which help them to adapt to an ever-changing risk landscape.
The scope of the company’s fraud and forensic accounting services is extensive. This encompasses computer forensic investigations in criminal cases, civil litigation, and employment actions, along with fraud detection and investigation, examinations of corporate integrity and security arrangements, and other similar activities.
Expertise in valuing enterprises in partner and shareholder disputes, as well as providing insights into divorce disputes, round out the team’s capabilities in analyzing loss of profit and earnings claims, quantifying commercial claims, and so on.
Additionally, they do audits of royalties and licensing agreements, investigate charges of professional negligence, and make suggestions.
The company also has a staff full of experts in AML who have worked in high-risk settings, many of them hold the Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialist designation. The team includes ex-regulatory examiners, who contribute unique insights to AML engagements.
With over a thousand financial institutions as clients, the business is well-versed in handling a wide variety of AML concerns, particularly those involving high-risk international components. Auditing, monitoring, training, and ongoing advising responsibilities are just some of the ways in which they aid clients with compliance.
The company offers a wide range of anti-money laundering services, including advice on risk rating methodologies, risk rating outsourcing, enhanced due diligence, regulatory issue advisory, independent model and system validation, system optimization and tuning, independent testing and audit, risk assessments, training, look-back projects, system selection, and new product and service consulting.
In addition, the company offers information security services tailored to reduce the likelihood and consequences of data and system breaches. Experts in the field of information systems assurance provide guidance for making sure everything runs well and that backup plans are in place in case of an emergency.
Their offerings span the gamut from pre- and post-implementation evaluations to attack and penetration testing, as well as system assurance and interrogation, project management, assurance, controls design, and implementation.
The company’s own approach and tools designed specifically for service organization control allow for effective management of SOC (Service Organization Control) engagements.
Tax
Their tax services are built around their extensive and up-to-date understanding of local requirements. They offer clients comprehensive, individualized solutions through cross-jurisdictional collaboration among its tax experts. Their seasoned tax advisors provide sound counsel that is both commercially driven and socially responsible, and they do so without compromising their clients’ trust or the quality of their work in any way.
Business tax compliance, tax investigations, transaction services, succession and exit tax planning, and assistance for tax-exempt organizations are all part of their extensive menu of tax services. In order to maximize their clients’ eligibility for worldwide incentives and credits, they work directly with them to address any technical requirements and produce any supporting documentation.
They have combined all of their worldwide indirect tax data into one location to help employees make better decisions. Updates from tax authorities in each country are included, as well as details on any new business-friendly policies or reliefs.
The tax implications of potential mergers and acquisitions are an important factor to consider. Their RSM Global M&A Tax Virtual Hub helps middle-market company executives with international mergers and purchases.
Meanwhile, RSM M&A tax services cover international investment structuring (both outbound and inbound), transfer pricing, cross-border cash planning, indirect tax, customs and trade, global employer services, income tax planning, estate and gift planning, international property transactions, wills and trusts, philanthropy, family services, succession and transition planning, and valuation services.
In addition to their proficiency in mergers and acquisitions taxation, they have extensive experience in all aspects of transfer pricing around the world.
This includes conducting risk assessments of existing transfer pricing arrangements, providing advice on operating models, creating transfer pricing policy frameworks, providing implementation support, drafting documentation, overseeing country-by-country reporting compliance, assisting with advance pricing arrangements, and preparing support files for business restructuring.
They offer different tax services and have experts in the field who work hard to help businesses identify tax solutions that help them stay in compliance, reduce risk, and increase growth and profit.
Wealth Management
By drawing on the resources of the RSM global network, RSM Private Client Services is able to provide continuous assistance to clients as they work to preserve their wealth for future generations.
RSM Consulting Review in a Nutshell
The RSM network of accountants is well-known for its expertise and breadth of offerings. While the Isle of Man office does play a little role in the company’s operations, providing retirement services is only a small fraction of what they do.
If you’re just looking here and there, note that RSM doesn’t readily detail its charges and fees on its website. There are more transparent providers in this aspect.
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