About the firm
A Chartered Accountancy firm led by CA Saphal Maharjan.
Every set of accounts is, in the end, an account of how an enterprise spent its year. Somewhere within the figures sits a decision that took nerve, a season that tested the business, an obligation that was honoured. The task of this firm is to read that record with care, to test whether it is presented faithfully, and to state the conclusion without ornament.
Saphal & Associates undertakes statutory audits, internal audits and the donor and project audits on which development organisations rely, together with taxation, accounting and bookkeeping, corporate registration and compliance work, and financial advisory engagements. The firm's clients range from non-profit organisations accountable to funders abroad to companies in regulated and commercial sectors accountable to boards, lenders and regulators at home.
Financial statements are examined and prepared under the reporting frameworks that apply in Nepal, and the right framework is chosen for the entity in front of us. In practice this means the full Nepal Financial Reporting Standards for larger and public-interest entities, NFRS for Small and Medium-sized Entities, the Nepal Accounting Standard for Micro Entities, and the Nepal Accounting Standard for Not-for-Profit Organisations, with International Financial Reporting Standards applied where they are called for. Beyond the figures, an engagement usually reaches into the machinery beneath them: internal controls, procurement, payroll, project expenditure and the long list of statutory obligations that sit quietly behind a balance sheet. What is found is set out for boards, donors and management in language that leaves no room for guessing.
The firm keeps deliberately close to its work. Engagements are led in person rather than passed down a chain, which keeps the questions sharp and the timelines honest, and ensures that the individual who signs the report is the individual who has understood the file.
Every industry carries its own conventions, its own pressures and its own characteristic ways of going wrong. These are the sectors this practice has come to know from the inside.
Saphal Maharjan is a Chartered Accountant and the proprietor of the firm. His experience in accounting, audit and financial analysis now approaches a decade, drawn from the two settings that teach the discipline most thoroughly: professional practice, where one learns to ask the right question, and industry, where one learns why the answer matters.
Immediately before establishing the firm, he worked as a financial analyst in credit rating, assessing companies from the outside and forming a view on whether their numbers could be relied upon. That work called for a close reading of financial statements, business models, industry position and regulatory risk across sectors as varied as hydropower, manufacturing, banking, insurance, hospitality and education. It is a demanding apprenticeship for an auditor, because a rating analyst learns early that a statement can be arithmetically flawless and still fail to describe the business it claims to represent.
The years before that were spent in professional practice, including a period as a Senior Accountant, preparing and reviewing financial statements, conducting audits, managing month-end and year-end closings, and building the internal controls and accounting policies that hold a company steady between one audit and the next. Over the same period he founded Saphal Consulting Services, through which smaller businesses have found accounting, bookkeeping and compliance support scaled to their size rather than imposed upon it.
Four commitments shape every engagement, and they are not ornament. They are the reasons a signature at the foot of a report is worth anything at all.
An opinion carries weight only to the extent of the independence behind it. Every engagement is accepted and conducted with the objectivity the profession demands, and set aside where that objectivity cannot be assured.
A firm is entrusted with matters a business shares with almost no one. Whatever is learned in the course of an engagement remains within it, and is put to no other use.
The work is governed by the accounting and auditing standards and the code of ethics issued for the profession in Nepal, and by a habit of reading that does not stop, because the framework rarely stands still.
Findings are written to be understood rather than to impress. A report a board or a donor cannot act upon has not yet finished its work.
Anyone who has practised in Nepal knows the familiar scramble. The rate chart you need is buried in a document a colleague shared two engagements ago. The circular that changes everything sits several clicks deep on a portal last redesigned in another decade. The template you are rebuilding from memory already exists, finished and better, on someone else's computer. The knowledge is not missing. It is merely scattered.
This library is a modest effort to gather some of that knowledge in one place and keep it in order: the references, the working notes and the practical tools that arise from the firm's own practice. Students preparing for their examinations are welcome to it, as are practitioners who simply need the correct chart before a deadline, and business owners trying to make sense of what their accountant is telling them. It is free, and it is intended to remain so.
A profession is measured not only by what its members do for their clients, but also by what they are willing to leave behind for the next person to take up.
A note on this page. The rules of professional conduct do not permit a Chartered Accountant to advertise or to claim superiority over others, and nothing here is intended in that spirit. The page describes the firm, its background and its approach to the work, and draws no comparison with any other practice.
The library improves whenever a reader points out what is missing, what has changed, or what has simply fallen out of date. A correction is always received as a courtesy, never as a complaint.
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