If you’re preparing to take your company public, you surely know you have a lot of new reporting and legal requirements to meet, and that your organization will require a number of changes. You may also know that you will need help in this process, or at least some good guidance.
The latest edition of Protiviti’s Guide to Public Company Transformation: Frequently Asked Questions, released last month, offers just such guidance. It’s a comprehensive and helpfully organized 55-page reference that organizations can use to find an answer to just about every question during the exhilarating and exhausting time surrounding an initial public offering (IPO) – from when is the best time to go public to how to make sure transformation efforts, including Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance, are maintained in the post-IPO period.
An IPO frequently requires a complete company transformation. Newly public companies may need to upgrade their financial reporting processes, information technology (IT) environments, as well as their governance, risk and compliance (GRC) capabilities. They will need to meet and maintain compliance with SOX and other financial reporting requirements, none of which are easy or straightforward.
While ringing the bell is perhaps the most exciting moment in an IPO journey, the actual transformation work behind the scenes is just beginning. Once listed on the exchange, the company needs to continue to evolve its functions, transforming itself into a business that meets and reports on an entirely different set of public and regulatory expectations. It’s a lengthy, complicated process, and mistakes can be time-consuming and costly.
To lessen the burden and increase the chance of success during this transformation, the new edition of the guide places a greater focus on the post-IPO period – in other words, we look beyond the IPO itself to ensure that companies know what’s needed to become – and stay – scalable and fully compliant in the future. This change in focus is reflected throughout the guide, as well as in the guide’s title − we’ve replaced the word “readiness” with “transformation” to indicate what an IPO truly is.
Other new or updated areas in the third edition of the FAQ guide include:
- A section on developing an executable strategy and action plan prioritization map; this replaces prioritization maps used in previous editions.
- Updated information on current laws, including the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act and the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act.
- Updates about revenue recognition, including updated accounting standards from the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB). That includes a specific update, Revenue from Contracts with Customers, and the FASB’s recently issued new standard on accounting for leases.
- A discussion about accurate forecasting and budgeting.
- Updates on IT policy and process-related evaluations and activities.
- A discussion about data security and privacy strategies and policies.
- An update on the costs of becoming a public company, and an overview of the largest cost components.
Last but not least, it’s been our goal to make this guide as user-friendly as possible so that executives and managers can continue to consult it at every step of the process – let us know what you think in the comments.
And we will continue this conversation on April 26, in a webinar on the challenges faced by growing companies. You can register here.
