Introduction
Our Mission
"Derivatives accounting is an incredibly complex and highly technical area. Getting it wrong has both economic and financial statement implications. Getting it right can provide us with the margin protection that we need to stay competitive." --Hedge Trackers' Client
Hedge Trackers' mission is to help our clients get derivatives accounting right.
We are a derivatives' accounting consulting and outsourcing firm that focuses on the implementation and maintenance of market risk hedge programs. We help our clients identify and quantify their market exposures and account for the derivative instruments they use to manage those exposures. We don't execute trades, provide delivery instructions, or move clients' cash. We use trade information communicated to us by our clients to track hedged items, we capture market data to value instruments, and we prepare effectiveness tests, all in order to generate accurate accounting entries that clients can pull into their general ledger systems.
Hedge Trackers has provided entries and successfully implemented derivative accounting programs at over 250 companies of all sizes, across numerous industries, with varied risk profiles. For almost 10 years, under the guidance of Hedge Trackers' Founder and President, Helen Kane, our firm has been committed to accumulating and transferring to clients relevant and practical derivative accounting know-how. At the same time, we continue to develop our staff to ensure our derivatives accountants can apply the firm's collective technical knowledge to provide our outsourcing clients with US GAAP-compliant derivative accounting entries and disclosure inputs for their financial statements.
While anchored in its core business of derivatives accounting and consulting, the firm has grown and expanded not just its client base but also its offerings, to include onsite and offsite specialized training and software licensing of the company's proprietary FAS 133 foreign exchange derivative software, AcappellaFX.
Years of hands-on, practical application of FAS 133 in corporate settings positioned us to meet the increasing demands of additional derivative related pronouncements, most recently FAS 157 (measuring fair value) and FAS 161 (derivative disclosures).
At Hedge Trackers:
We inspire confidence. Hedge Trackers' founder and president, Helen Kane, has been a thought leader on hedge accounting for over a decade. Uncharacteristically, she began her career in industry, working in corporate treasury and finance before moving to Deloitte and Touche where she managed the Silicon Valley Capital Markets practice. Since its inaugural meeting in 2004, Helen has been chairing the accounting industry's premier Derivative Accounting Conference. This semi-annual event sponsored by CPE, Inc., provides current content and thought leadership on FAS 133 through the participation of both current and prior SEC and FASB staff as well as audit firms' national office derivative specialists and technical practitioners from active hedging corporations.
Helen's commitment to knowledge transfer affords Hedge Trackers' clients unique access to one of the industry's most notable and well regarded hedge accounting expert. Our clients are confident in Helen's guidance and often rely on her expertise to guide discussions with outside auditors and translate "FASB-speak" into familiar financial and business terms for senior management and board members.
We are active participants. We work directly with our clients to align their accounting with economic exposures and to develop a robust exposure collection and management framework, including appropriate documentation and effectiveness testing. Once a hedge is executed, we generate the accounting entries.
We guarantee an immediate and capable response. We understand our clients' environments because so many of our consultants have corporate treasury and Big-Four audit backgrounds. Working as a team, our consultants can often anticipate questions, foresee obstacles and respond quickly and competently to burning issues. We can, and we will, step into an urgent situation and work with a client to reach a quick resolution.
We are flexible. Hedge Trackers LLC provides the full range of FAS 133 and FAS 52 solutions to the market place. We implement exposure-capture processes, validate underlying accounting results, create hedge policy and provide FAS133 documentation complete with effectiveness testing and an effectiveness measurement approach. We then prepare monthly journal entries and support our clients' external reporting requirements. Some clients rely on the full range of offerings; others depend on our firm for monthly derivative entry preparation while others may need only occasional support, and training. In all cases, we provide a solution that suits that client's needs.
We create a solid partnership. Our objective is to develop a strong foundation for our clients so that they understand both the derivatives they use to hedge their exposures as well as the related derivative accounting. We provide specialized resources to support client companies through their routine personnel changes and through increasingly routine GAAP changes. We bring current issues to our clients through traditional and web-based trainings and technical newsletters.
We build a bridge between treasury and accounting. Leveraging our corporate treasury and big-four accounting firm experiences, we are comfortable with both treasury and accounting concerns. It is critical to have a solid understanding of the accounting requirements that support trading actions required for favorable financial statement presentation. And it's imperative that accounting organizations understand derivatives to be an effective control and meet valuation and effectiveness measurement requirements. We can help bridge the departmental gap.