Method
The method, in five steps
How a piece of work begins, how it is conducted and where it ends.
Method is what separates a survey from a well-written opinion. Ours was not designed in a meeting room: it came from years looking after our own wealth, where a mistake comes out of your own pocket and there is no client to pass the bill to. What repeated itself became a step; what went wrong became a rule. The five steps below are always the same, in the same order, whether the practice is tax, energy, credit, land registry or succession.
The order matters more than it seems. It exists so that no decision of the client's is taken without the information that precedes it — and so that no action of ours happens before the authorisation that permits it. That is why the work begins with a document that limits our own access, and not with a commercial proposal.
There is a useful side effect to this design: it makes the work auditable from outside. Any auditor — internal, external or the tax authority itself — can walk the same trail and arrive at the same place, because every figure has its calculation beside it and every step has its date. This is not decorative rigour. It is the only way to sustain a thesis when someone questions it three years later, with the original team already replaced.
The work begins in writing. A letter defines exactly what will be examined, for how long and by whom, and formalises confidentiality over everything seen. Before it, nothing is accessed — not even the public files anyone could consult. It is a limitation we impose on ourselves, and it is deliberate: the boundary of access is set by the client, not by our curiosity.
Under power of attorney, data is drawn from official sources — not from internal spreadsheets, not from estimates, not from what the controllership believes happened. The analysis starts from what the system itself recorded, which is also what the tax authority will look at. When the official source diverges from internal control, that divergence is already a finding, and usually one of the most valuable.
The result is an opinion, not a presentation. Every thesis enters with its declared degree of solidity and a calculation reconstructible line by line: where the figure came from, which rule sustains it, what it is worth and over what time. The company decides seeing what exists — and seeing too, in writing, what is not worth pursuing. Refusal is part of the opinion.
Once the opinion is approved, execution follows the ordinary procedure, with the documentation the opinion has already structured. Litigation is not a starting point: when the judicial path proves unavoidable, that is a decision taken with the client, with cost and timeline on the table. The opposite design — starting with a lawsuit — tends to pay whoever executes better than it pays the cash position of whoever engages.
The work does not end with the opinion, nor with the filing of the claim. We follow each offset through to homologation, with defence included in case of an audit of what we assessed. Whoever points out the path answers for it to the end — and the end, here, is the moment the value is in cash and can no longer be questioned.
Every thesis enters the opinion with its degree of solidity written beside it: settled, probable or speculative. The company decides knowing the classification, not after learning it. Declining a fragile thesis is part of the service, not a failure of it.
The ordinary, quiet path, with no litigation as a starting point. When court proceedings are unavoidable, that is a decision taken with the client — never the initial design of the work.
Every figure reconstructible, every step documented, so that any auditor can redo the path and arrive at the same place. That is what sustains a thesis years later, when nobody remembers how it was built.
Official sources, at the exact point — the article of law, the service or the search you can use today. None replaces analysis of the specific case, which is our work.
No thesis moves forward without its classification written beside it. That is what separates a survey from a promise.
Say in two lines what you need to resolve. An account manager replies personally, in business hours, and the conversation starts where it makes a difference.
This pagepoint the camera
