BDO assists the HR service provider with their eight legal entities.
With over 400 corporate clients and offices in 80 countries worldwide, NetExpat is the leading global provider of HR services like assessing, training and coaching employees. A couple of years ago, Alain Verstandig, founder and CEO of NetExpat, asked Dirk Vandendaele, Managing Partner Accounting & Reporting at BDO Belgium, to help out with the complex accounting side of the company. We asked Alain about the story behind NetExpat and how the collaboration with BDO came to be.
- How did NetExpat become what it is today?
Alain: “I started NetExpat 25 years ago, in 1998. I always had a passion for HR but I used my background in engineering to grow and expand our firm throughout the years. Together with a great team, we deliver HR services to the major multinationals in the world. We started out in Belgium with our first location and expanded to Paris and London that same year. Even though we were still a start-up back then, we quickly faced the challenges of being a multinational service provider and realised we needed to tackle them.”
- What kind of accountancy challenges did you face back then?
Alain: “Our clients are almost only international employers who have at least 50.000 employees. This brings forth a certain complexity in accounting, especially in the taxation differences between entities internationally. Nowadays, we work with eight legal entities in the world and a couple of permanent establishments in a bunch of time zones, ranging from China to the U.S. So you can imagine that we always have a couple of interesting questions and tactical things to cover on the accounting side.”
- How did you end up working with BDO?
Alain: “In the beginning, we could only work with smaller accounting firms. Slowly but surely, we've been able to grow our business and think bigger. So at some stage, we needed a larger accounting firm that could glue together all the eight legal entities we have today from an international perspective.
NetExpat is big enough to provide services to large multinationals all over the world but that doesn’t mean we need the same accounting systems as these companies. A couple of years ago BDO jumped in to optimise and bring all these systems together with this in mind. This definitely brought us to another level of comfort and expertise.”
- What accounting services does BDO provide to NetExpat?
Alain: “BDO is integrating the whole financial logic, the tax coherence and compliance between a team of accountants that we have in different locations. In some locations, they are also doing our local accounting. For the moment, they are our financial safety belt in our expansion and our business globally.”
- What do you like about working with BDO?
Alain: “Having an approachable and flexible way of working is extremely important to me. And those are two things that are definitely present in our collaboration with BDO. I like the way Dirk and his colleagues are hyper-reactive. I don’t have to deal with a bunch of compliance papers or wait long to get advice, unlike with other big accountancy firms. That’s why we also hope to select BDO as our local accounting firm for the new NetExpat structure in India.
In addition, I also like the agility of BDO. A characteristic which is not found in a lot of companies in this day and age. We are an extremely entrepreneurial, lean and no-brainer organisation and I like working with people that think and act the same way.”