Foreword: A strong year for BDO
The financial year 2018/19 was a good and strong year for BDO. We continue to be among the market leaders within advisory and audit, we have developed our tax and VAT business further, taken an even higher market share in the public market, activities in our Business Services & Outsourcing have grown beyond expectations, and the Advisory department, which now also includes Corporate Finance, shows a steady development.
The year was characterized by huge investments and we have designed our business, in particular within IT and specialist competencies, to meet the future requirements by innovative solutions which promote the contact to our clients, streamline the daily operations, and strengthen the security in relation management of risk and compliance.
Taken as a whole, our business has grown and revenue is DKK 1,022 m for the financial year. A good development for BDO which at the end of the financial year had 1,250 employees and partners, and offices in 32 locations in Denmark.
We are pleased that BDO is successful and we are conscious that we have achieved the good results because our focus always is on our clients’ success.
BDO guarantees confidence, reliability and empathy throughout our activities and our strategy is to be represented in offices throughout Denmark and we emphasize that we offer the best of both worlds by empathy and commitment. We are the advisor who is close to our clients and who uses insight and empathy to advise our clients. We are also specialists with a high competence level and a strong global network which ensure representation in more than 160 countries. Our clients can be assured that they can always grow bigger together with BDO.
The combination of a focused winner strategy and of having the competencies to advise regionally, locally and globally gives BDO a strong and competitive starting point. At BDO it is not either or, but always both and. This is the reason that we in the financial year 2018/2019, in a cooperation with Spar Nord, decided to establish a business award ’Succesvirksomhed 2019’ (success business) which celebrates Denmark’s small and medium-size businesses that are top-performing.
BDO wish to thank clients, business partners, staff, partners and senior partners for a good year in which we created relations and knowledge for the benefit of business and the entire society. We look forward to working with you all in the coming financial year.
Best regards
Executive Board and Board of Directors of BDO
Management’s Review: Focused strategy reinforces an impressive level
BDO’s financial development was positive in the financial year just ended. Our strategy to offer a wide range of advisory, auditing and accounting services provided by increasingly skilled specialists has again proved its strength.
Growth and further consolidation in the financial year 2018/19
In the financial year 2018/19, BDO realized revenue of DKK 1.022 m and a solvency ratio of 22.04 per cent which is a positive development compared to the financial year 2017/18 and in accordance with the expectations announced in the latest annual report.
It is encouraging that the strategy we have pursued in recent years and which has given us a continuous growth for several years again gives satisfactory results. We are certain that our business model and selected focus areas ensure that we have a robust and promising basis for acting out our ambitions in the years to come. It is also positive that the financial growth goes hand in hand with an increasingly higher client satisfaction, a high employee satisfaction, a high management quality, and an increasingly stronger image in the market.
The expectations for the future are that we continue in the coming financial year at the same growth rate as in the current year.
Mergers and acquisitions: As a market consolidator we seek dialogue with the best
In a complex advisory and accounting market it is more than ever necessary to involve deep specialist knowledge and international knowhow in the client relations, and we therefore seek a dialogue with best in the market. BDO is a market consolidator and we want to speak with the players in the business sector who can see the potentials of being a part of a strong, empathic and client-oriented culture which has focused business entities with specialized knowledge and an award-winning international network.
During the recent year we introduced a new department and welcomed new colleagues in Aabybro. After the end of the financial year, we expanded our range of services with a new business area as we acquired the consulting and advisory business Toldkonsulenterne A/S. We have now the strongest competencies in the market within customs duties which makes us a key provider in an increasingly internationalized market.
At BDO we generally aim to optimize our already strong market position by acquisition of new business areas and advisory and audit teams that match our high level of ambition. We are one of the market’s most attractive advisory and accounting firms to merge with. Mergers and acquisitions have always been part of our special DNA. Our numerous successful acquisitions over the years bear witness of this. The reason for the success we have in realizing acquisitions and subsequently create cohesion with new BDO branches is, among others, that new partners, colleagues, and business areas are integrated with respect in the organization.
Our growth strategy includes both organic growth and cooperation/acquisition of other businesses. BDO is, and will be in future, in an active dialogue with other specialists in the advisory and accounting sector who can see the cohesion in our business model which aims to ensure proximity and a high level of presence.
Strong winner culture with focus on digitalization, data security, and specialization ensures that BDO can meet future requirements
The focus areas in relation to digitalization, specialization, industry-sector focus, and a strong winner culture was further intensified in the financial year 2018/19.
To strengthen our digital efforts, we have in recent years invested in both competences and new technology. The year 2018/19 was also a year of huge investments and our focused digitalization process now delivers both internal and external digital potentials.
With the best starting point in the form of the cloud path we have now a quite new IT systems landscape which promotes the opportunities of offering our clients and staff the best possible data security and most new digital benefits.
Our strategy to pursue specialization in all five business entities: Private audit, Public audit, Tax and VAT, Advisory and Corporate Finance has taken us to a still stronger professional level within advisory and accounting.
An example of successful specialization is that our increasing volume of Business Services & Outsourcing services under the services that Private audit offers, besides creating proximity to our clients, gives a totality in BDO’s wide range of services. This is advisory in its broadest sense.
Over the years, it has generally been a strong motivation factor for our specialists to create overall solutions for the benefit of our clients, and it is therefore very positive that we have succeeded in creating synergies across our business. We do Compliance and standardization of processes based on a positive and business developing approach, and we experience that our efforts within GDPR and Cyber in the past years have strengthened our relations as an advisory and accounting firm.
High management quality and high employee satisfaction
We measure our employee satisfaction so that we can continuously follow the level of job satisfaction. Every second year, we evaluate the management quality, and every second year we measure employee satisfaction by the employee survey ‘Temperaturmålingen’*.
To us, continuous learning and a high management quality is important and our leaders therefore attend a special two-year leadership course which strengthens their competences.
The satisfaction among BDO’s staff is high. Job satisfaction and the loyalty level is considerably higher than in the Danish labour market in general and a great deal higher than in businesses in related sectors.
We are pleased every day to offer a good place to work with high job satisfaction and the opportunity to retain and attract competent employees. The in-house value work of “Empathy creates development” is embedded in the BDO DNA, and within the advisory market it makes BDO a natural choice. The average length of employment at BDO is nine years which also bears witness of a high level of employee satisfaction.
*Source: Ennova Employee Index.
Satisfied clients position BDO in the marked
We use the internationally recognized client satisfaction survey NPS, Net Promoter Score, which asks the question: ‘How likely is it that you will recommend BDO to a friend or colleague?’ to measure the level of satisfaction of all our client relations. For the third year in a row we have raised our Net Promoter Score considerably from an already high level, which is very positive and a good indicator that satisfied clients contribute to position BDO in the sector.
Our NPS surveys provide us with documentary proof that we continuously improve our client relations and continue to strengthen the cooperation at all stages. Thus, we create the foundation for our client satisfaction to stay in top of the sector in the coming financial year.
Our ambitions are reflected in our mission: ‘Through empathy BDO helps create development for our clients and the people behind’. And our vision shows the path: ’BDO is a leading advisory and accounting firm which by competences and empathy has the most satisfied clients.’
Unlike other big international accounting firms, local ownership and local management is the foundation of BDO’s international cooperation. It is our clear conviction that only through empathy and local insight into our clients’ businesses will the coupling to international width and depth be successful.
The BDO network has its headquarters in Brussels and 2018/19 was globally a good year; showing significant growth in results and geographical development. BDO is now represented by more than 1,800 offices in over 160 countries with more than 88,000 employees,
BDO Global gives us direct access to expert knowledge on national issues in other member firm countries for the benefit of our clients. During the year, we have seen that an increasing number of tasks are dealt with in cooperation with international specialists from our global network.
The strong international BDO network means that we in Denmark can service our clients in international matters and provide the same quality that we provide to our Danish clients because both quality standards, audit methodology and tools are the same throughout the network. It gives confidence that no matter where in the world our clients contact BDO, the experience will be that all BDO people are committed to BDO’s international vision that BDO stands for exceptional client service, delivered by exceptional people.
Annual report 2018/19 in danish