Wide-ranging expertise and a good service attitude have made Rantalainen Finland’s leading accounting firm for companies with international operations.
Service Manager Joakim Lindfors, who heads up Rantalainen’s international unit in Vantaa, exudes a certain calm cheerfulness. That, and patience, are necessary, because serving international customers is a process of constant tailoring and compromising between the legal duties in Finland and customers’ internal reporting.
It is not uncommon for Lindfors and his subordinates to receive a 100-page manual from abroad on how to handle a customer’s accounting.
“We create a reporting model that fulfils both the customer’s needs and the demands of Finnish legislation. In practice, we act as a link between the customer’s requirements and the Finnish tax authority,” Lindfors says.
A one-stop shop
Rantalainen Accounting Services Ltd. is the third-largest chain of accounting firms in Finland and the largest family company in the industry, with over 500 employees.
The company serves both foreign companies establishing themselves in Finland and Finnish companies seeking to enter the international market.
Rantalainen’s clients operating in Finland have parent companies in Asia, Israel, the United States, Spain, Russia, Estonia, Croatia, Serbia, Germany and the Scandinavian countries, just to name a few.
Outside of Finland, Rantalainen serves customers itself as well as in cooperation with its partners in Russia, Estonia and Sweden. For example, its subsidiary in St. Petersburg offers financial administration and legal services for foreign companies establishing themselves or broadening their operations in Russia in cooperation with the Finnish legal office MK-Law Ltd.
The idea is that Rantalainen’s customers in Finland can also handle financial administration for their companies in Russia and Estonia while still dealing with a Finnish company.
“If desired, the customer can receive all the necessary consulting and financial reporting regarding its international operations in its preferred language and in Finland, adapted to suit the IFRS or FAS system,” says Jussi Ala-Risku, Business Director at Rantalainen.
Rantalainen is part of the Geneva Group International (GGI) network of experts, which enables the company to arrange financial administration services for its customers in 120 different countries.
In addition to Finnish and Swedish, Rantalainen’s international unit has employees who speak German, Russian, Estonian and Spanish as their mother tongue, as well as English, Italian, Portuguese, Danish and Norwegian as second languages.
The unit employs experts with degrees in financial administration from Russia, Estonia, Germany, Spain and the Dominican Republic, in addition to Finland.
Original publication can be found in Blue Wings Curiosity issue October 2016 from this link.