If your accountancy practice doesn’t hold an audit licence, you may be looking for audit services for accountancy firms. You’ll have likely faced faced this problem: a client grows past the audit threshold, or takes on external investment, or a lender starts asking for statutory accounts with an audit opinion attached – and suddenly you need to refer them somewhere. The trouble is, most of the obvious options come with a catch. Refer them to a full-service firm and there’s always a question mark over whether that firm might, over time, start pitching for the accounts, the tax work, the advisory relationship – everything you’ve spent years building.
Who audits my clients if I don’t hold an audit licence?
Under the Companies Act 2006, only a registered auditor can sign a statutory audit opinion. If your practice isn’t registered – most commonly with ICAEW or ACCA – you have three broad options when a client needs one: hand the client over entirely, ask them to run two separate advisers in parallel, or find a firm that will carry out the audit and then step back, leaving the rest of the relationship with you.
Unsurprisingly, that third option is what most smaller practices actually want, but it’s a bigger issue than it might first appear. A significant number of UK practices have chosen not to hold an audit licence at all, simply because it’s expensive to maintain – regulatory fees, continuing professional development, quality monitoring visits – for a service line some firms only need a handful of times a year. The regulatory bar has also risen further recently: under ICAEW’s revised Audit Regulations, sole practice auditors were required to appoint an alternate by December 2025, and any firm applying for registration has to satisfy ICAEW’s Audit Registration Committee that it’s fit and proper to carry out audit work. For a practice with only occasional audit need, none of that makes commercial sense.
So the referral relationship isn’t a stopgap most firms will grow out of. For most, it’s the permanent model – which is exactly why who you refer to matters.
Will an audit partner take my clients?
It’s a common enough worry that it comes up regularly on practitioner forums, even if hard evidence is understandably scarce – nobody will name names in public – but yes, it happens. We publicly see – on forums etc – accountants swap recommendations for “audit only” firms and ask each other for personal references on non-poaching before they’ll make an introduction – enough of a recurring theme to suggest it’s a real consideration for the profession, whatever the true scale of it.
The safest route is to work with a firm that will make an explicit commitment not to compete for referred clients. Williamson & Croft will do just that.
What to check before referring an audit client
Before referring a client, it’s worth establishing:
- Registered auditor status. Confirm the firm is genuinely registered to sign audit opinions under the Companies Act, not simply offering audit support.
- Who actually does the work. Ask whether the engagement is led by senior, experienced staff, or handed to junior team members with light-touch oversight.
- How they report back. A good audit partner keeps you in the loop throughout, not just at sign-off, so you’re not blindsided by findings that affect the wider relationship.
- References from other accountants. Any firm serious about this model should be able to put you in touch with practices it already works with.
- Local reach. For clients who value a face-to-face audit process, a partner with a presence in your region makes the handover smoother.
An audit partner in Manchester and Liverpool
Williamson & Croft’s Audit Department has been carrying out statutory audits for well over a decade, working alongside general practice accountants across Manchester, Liverpool and the wider North West rather than in competition with them. As part of the UHY Hacker Young network, the team draws on national audit methodology and resource while keeping the relationship local and personal.
If you’re a smaller practice without an audit licence, weighing up who to trust with a client’s audit, we’d rather have that conversation directly than have you find out the hard way. Get in touch with Tor Stringfellow our Audit Partner below to talk through how a referral relationship would work for your firm.