The experience behind your numbers

Meet Patrick Berne

Patrick is a Chartered Management Accountant (ACMA, CGMA) and the founder of Berne & Co Accountancy Services. What sets him apart from most high-street accountants is where he's come from: not just a practice, but more than a decade as a Financial Controller and finance leader inside real businesses, across construction, manufacturing, utilities and industry.

He hasn't sat in one office doing the same accounts year after year. He's run finance functions across multiple businesses and sites, producing the monthly management accounts, building the budgets and forecasts, controlling the working capital and driving the cost savings that keep a business healthy, as part of the senior team responsible for its performance. He's stepped in as Financial Controller across several sites, improved working capital by 20% in one role, built the financial controls and systems others still run on, and handled financial planning and analysis (FP&A) for the European division of a multi-billion-pound group.

Crucially for you, that experience runs right through the construction industry. He's worked inside construction firms and specialist contractors, dealt with subcontractors across the UK and Ireland, and handled CIS, VAT and the day-to-day realities of the trade, retentions, applications for payment, job costs and all. He's seen how building businesses really work from the inside, not from behind a desk once a year.

Patrick founded Berne & Co to bring that hard-won, real-world experience to owner-managed building firms, giving contractors the kind of proactive, commercially-minded finance partner most only get when they're big enough to employ a Financial Controller of their own.