The fixed asset specialists behind CPCON UK

CPCON was founded in the 1990s with a simple conviction: financial statements are only as honest as the physical reality behind them. Three decades later, that conviction has carried the firm through more than 4,500 fixed asset, inventory and valuation projects, and built operations across Brazil, the United States, Mexico, Spain, the United Arab Emirates and now the United Kingdom.

We occupy a deliberately independent position in the market. We are not an audit firm — so our verification work can serve as evidence for your auditor without conflict. We are not a software vendor — so our RFID and tracking recommendations are engineered around your estate, not a licence target. What we sell is accuracy: registers, counts and valuations that survive scrutiny.

Our story

CPCON started where most accuracy problems start: on the floor of a business whose records no longer described what it owned. The early engagements were large-scale fixed asset inventories — walking plants and offices, identifying every asset, and reconciling what was found against registers that had drifted for years. That work established the principle the firm has never moved away from: the count is not the deliverable; the reconciliation is. A number is only worth as much as the evidence attached to it.

Through the 2000s the firm added a valuation advisory practice, so that an estate could not only be verified but valued for accounts, insurance and transactions. In the 2010s CPCON built its own RFID tracking platform and deployed it at enterprise scale, turning periodic counts into something approaching continuous visibility, and established operations across the Americas and the Middle East. In the 2020s the firm expanded into Europe, passed 4,500 delivered projects, and added AI-assisted reconciliation to accelerate the matching of large, inconsistent datasets. In 2026 CPCON UK launched, bringing the full methodology to organisations across the United Kingdom. The full delivery record sits on our experience page.

What did not change across those three decades is the discipline. The firm grew by adding capability — valuation, RFID, AI-assisted reconciliation, new countries — without diluting the principle that every number must arrive with its evidence attached and that the people doing the counting must be the firm’s own. That is a harder way to scale than franchising a count crew or licensing a platform, and it is a deliberate choice: it is the only way to keep the result the same on the fiftieth site of a programme as on the first, and in the sixth country as in the first. The growth has been built on repeat work and referral rather than on locking clients into software, which is why the same methodology now relied on by FTSE-scale and Fortune-500 organisations is the methodology a single UK site receives.

Our mission

Our mission is to make asset and inventory records true — and to keep them true. Boards depend on those records to report results, insurers depend on them to price cover, tax authorities depend on them to test claims, and operations depend on them to run. When the record and the reality diverge, the cost shows up everywhere at once: depreciation on assets that no longer exist, premiums on values that are wrong, capital allowances left unclaimed, and a year-end count that turns into a write-off nobody can explain. CPCON exists to close that gap with evidence, and to put a process in place so it does not reopen.

What we value

Six commitments shape every engagement. They are not slogans — each one is a constraint we accept that a less independent provider would not. A software vendor cannot afford to tell you that you do not need more of its product; an audit firm cannot test its own verification work without a conflict; a labour broker has no stake in whether the count is right, only in whether it is staffed. CPCON has structured itself to be free of each of those tensions, and the values below are simply what that freedom is used for. Read together, they describe a firm whose only product is an accurate, defensible record — and whose commercial model depends on delivering exactly that, repeatedly, rather than on locking clients in.

How the firm is structured and governed

CPCON is a partner-led firm. Governance rests with the founder, who remains chief executive, and a partner group that pairs ex-Big 4 advisory experience with qualified accountants — including a Chartered Accountant who owns technical accounting standards across the firm’s operations. That structure is not incidental to the work: because the partner group itself spans audit, advisory and accounting, the technical treatment behind a deliverable — how additions, disposals, componentisation and revaluation are handled, what an auditor will expect to see, what a tax claim needs to evidence — is set by people who have done that work, not delegated to a template. Delivery operations are organised by region, with partners based in Latin America and the Middle East running those markets directly, so a programme spanning several countries is governed by people who understand each jurisdiction rather than managed at arm’s length from a single head office.

Methodologically, the firm is deliberately centralised: there is one documented method, one reconciliation logic and one reporting standard, and every operation applies them. That is what allows a multi-country estate to be reconciled to a single, consistent position, and it is what makes the UK launch a matter of bringing an established methodology to a new market rather than building one from scratch. The people who deliver are the firm’s own employees, trained to that method — a model that costs more than subcontracting but is the only way to guarantee the standard is identical on every site and in every country.

How we think about assets: physical, logical and CMDB

The single idea that distinguishes CPCON’s work is that an organisation does not have one asset record — it has at least three, and they rarely agree. Most providers reconcile two of them and declare victory. We reconcile all three, because any two can match while the third exposes the truth.

• The physical layer is what is actually present — the asset on the floor, the unit in the bin — confirmed by a trained counter, located, photographed and condition-graded.
• The logical (financial) layer is what the books say you own: the fixed asset register, the stock ledger and the depreciation schedules your auditor tests and your tax position relies on.
• The operational layer is the system the business actually runs on: the CMDB for IT and the configuration items it tracks, the CMMS or maintenance system for plant, the WMS for stock. This is where an asset’s working reality lives, and it is the layer most counts ignore.

Reconciling physical against financial finds ghost assets and uncapitalised additions. Reconciling physical against operational finds equipment the business depends on that nobody is maintaining or securing. Reconciling financial against operational finds the cost centre and the service owner disagreeing about the same asset. Only the three-way reconciliation surfaces all of it. For technology estates, where the gap between register, CMDB and discovery tooling is widest, this is the basis of our ITAM & CMDB audit and IT asset inventory work; for the wider estate it underpins fixed asset verification.

Quality, governance and certification — stated plainly

We are precise about what CPCON is and is not, because in this field imprecision is how trust is lost. CPCON is not a certification body and does not present itself as holding ISO certification of its own. That is a deliberate, honest position — and it is also exactly why our work is valuable to organisations that are pursuing certification.

An ISO 27001 information-security certification, a Cyber Essentials assessment, or an asset-management standard such as ISO 55001 all require the organisation to demonstrate that it knows what assets it holds, where they are, and that they are controlled. The certificate itself is granted by the client’s own certification body or auditor. What those assessors sample and rely on is the underlying evidence: a complete, accurate, reconciled asset inventory. That inventory is what CPCON produces. In other words, we deliver the evidence that supports the client’s certification — we do not and would not claim a certification of our own to stand in for it. The dedicated approach for security-driven inventories is described under ISO 27001 asset inventory.

Quality, for us, is therefore something engineered into method and people rather than asserted on a badge: a single documented methodology applied identically across sites and countries; our own trained field teams instead of subcontracted labour; blind counts with independent recounts on any line outside tolerance; cause-coded reconciliation that separates location error from genuine loss; and a complete evidence trail behind every figure. Governance of the firm rests with the founder and a partner group that combines ex-Big 4 advisory experience with qualified accountants, including a Chartered Accountant responsible for technical accounting standards across the firm’s operations.

It is worth dwelling on the certification point because it is so often blurred in our field. ISO 27001, ISO 55001 asset management and Cyber Essentials are all standards an organisation is certified against by an accredited body after assessment. They are not something a supplier can confer, and a supplier claiming to be “ISO certified” as a way of implying it can grant you the same is either confused or careless. CPCON’s position is unambiguous: we hold no such certification out as our own, and we would not, because doing so would misrepresent how certification actually works. What we do is upstream of the certificate and essential to it — the asset inventory that an information-security or asset-management assessor will insist is complete and accurate before they will certify anything. By producing that inventory to an evidenced, reconciled standard, we make the client’s certification achievable; we do not pretend to embody it. The security-driven version of that work is set out under ISO 27001 asset inventory.

Working alongside your auditor

A recurring reason organisations choose CPCON is the relationship the work has with statutory audit. Because we are not an audit firm, our verification and count work is not a competing opinion — it is evidence the auditor can observe, test and rely on. Under ISA (UK) 501 an auditor is expected to attend physical inventory counts and obtain evidence over the existence and condition of material assets and stock; a count that has been professionally planned, blind, recount-controlled and fully documented gives them exactly that, and turns what is often a year-end scramble into a controlled, evidenced event. The same applies to fixed assets: an independent verification, reconciled to the register with a documented ghost-asset and write-off schedule, gives the auditor a tested baseline rather than an assertion. We are comfortable working in coordination with a client’s audit timetable and engagement team, because our independence is precisely what makes our evidence useful to them.

A firm built across six countries

CPCON’s international footprint is operational, not decorative. Its base in the Americas remains the largest delivery operation; the Mexico operation anchors Latin America; the Spanish operation serves Iberia and the EU; the Middle East operation runs from Abu Dhabi; and the United States and United Kingdom complete the network. For a client with sites in more than one country, that footprint means a single estate is counted to one methodology by teams who understand the local regulatory and language context, and consolidated into one reconciled position — not assembled from a handful of disconnected local counts. The same senior methodology already relied on by FTSE-scale and Fortune-500 organisations is what the UK operation brings to British clients.

Leadership drawn from advisory and accounting

CPCON is led by its founder and a partner group whose backgrounds sit deliberately at the intersection of advisory, audit and accounting. That matters because the firm’s work lives at that intersection too: a fixed asset verification is fieldwork, but its output has to satisfy technical accounting standards, withstand audit testing and support a tax position. Ex-Big 4 advisory experience in the leadership means the deliverables are designed from the outset around what an auditor will ask for and what a finance function actually needs to post. A Chartered Accountant in the partner group owns technical accounting standards across the firm’s operations, so the treatment of additions, disposals, componentisation and revaluation is grounded in the standards rather than improvised on site. Regional operations in Latin America and the Middle East are led by partners based in those regions, so a multi-country programme is run by people who understand the local regulatory and language context rather than managed remotely.

How an engagement actually runs

For all the methodology behind it, working with CPCON is straightforward from the client’s side. An engagement begins with scope — the sites, the asset classes or SKU populations, the register or ledger to reconcile against, and the operational windows we have to work around. We agree a method statement and a schedule before mobilising, so there are no surprises about access, downtime or cut-off. On site, our own teams do the fieldwork; the client’s staff are not pulled off their day jobs to count. Reconciliation and cause-coding happen against the agreed data, and the result is handed over as a posting-ready file with its evidence attached, walked through with the finance or operations team rather than emailed as a spreadsheet. Where the engagement is ongoing — a cycle count programme, or periodic re-verification — the same discipline runs to a recurring cadence.

The deliverables are built around the obligations the client answers to: a reconciliation that supports FRS 102 Section 17 measurement, the record-keeping duty under Companies Act 2006 s.386, the physical-evidence expectations a statutory auditor applies under ISA (UK) 501, and the asset-level detail behind a capital allowances claim. Counting is the visible part of the work; the evidence trail is the part that holds up afterwards.

Breadth of estate, depth of method

Three decades across every major sector means there is little CPCON has not counted — production plant and CNC lines, diagnostic and theatre devices in hospitals, end-user and data-centre IT fleets, retail and warehouse stock, dispersed energy and utility infrastructure, branch networks, and the intangibles a tangible-only exercise misses. Each of those brings its own identification problem and its own constraint, from clinical-engineering records and infection-control access in healthcare to bonded-warehouse duty status in logistics. The methodology adapts to the estate; the discipline behind it does not change. How that plays out sector by sector is set out under industries, and the full delivery record on our experience page.

Working inside live, sensitive environments

CPCON works inside operating plants, hospitals, branch networks, data centres and regulated warehouses — environments where access, safety and confidentiality are not optional. Our teams are inducted to each site’s rules before they start, work to the operator’s method statements in hazardous and restricted areas, and treat client data and premises with the discretion the setting demands. Independence runs through this too: because we are not selling a software platform that has to phone home, the asset data we produce belongs to the client and is delivered to the client. The point of the engagement is to leave the organisation with an accurate, owned record — not a dependency.

What we actually do, across the asset lifecycle

CPCON is organised around the full life of an asset record rather than a single transaction, and in practice most engagements combine several services because the problems are connected. The starting point is almost always fixed asset verification: a physical inspection of every asset in scope, captured digitally with photographs and condition grading, then reconciled line by line to the register. That verification is the natural moment to fix identity, so untagged assets are labelled on the spot through asset tagging — durable barcode, QR or RFID labels on a clean numbering convention, so the next count takes hours rather than weeks.

Where the volume of assets or stock justifies it, RFID asset tracking turns periodic counting into something close to continuous visibility, cutting counting time by up to 90%. For inventory rather than fixed assets, stocktaking services and independent stock audit deliver accurate counts and the third-party evidence that year-end and lenders require. When an estate needs a value as well as a count, asset valuation aligned with RICS Red Book methodology supports accounts, insurance and transactions, extending to the intangible asset valuation a tangible-only exercise misses. And because a one-off count fixes only today, the lifecycle closes with the systems that keep the record true: a compliant fixed asset register under FRS 102, a rolling cycle counting programme, structured stock reconciliation and, where loss persists, shrinkage control.

What we tend to find

Three decades of fieldwork produce a depressingly consistent set of findings, and naming them is part of how we set expectations before an engagement starts. Registers that have not been physically checked for several years routinely carry ghost-asset rates of 10–30% — items still being depreciated and insured that physically left long ago. The mirror problem is just as common: real, working equipment that was never capitalised, quietly forfeiting capital allowances. Beyond those, we consistently find duplicate lines where one physical asset is carried twice, descriptions so generic that a register line could be almost anything, mobile assets recorded at the wrong site or cost centre, and — in warehouses — large gross variances hidden behind a reassuringly small net figure. None of these is visible from a desk; all of them have a cost; and each is exactly the kind of thing a classified, evidenced reconciliation is built to surface and resolve.

Why this matters now in the UK

CPCON UK launches at a moment when fixed asset data quality has moved back up the UK finance agenda. The FRS 102 Periodic Review amendments apply to accounting periods beginning on or after 1 January 2026, and most visibly they bring leased assets on-balance-sheet, where they will sit alongside owned assets in the same register. A register that was already drifting now has to absorb a new, material population of right-of-use assets and keep them accurate. At the same time, statutory auditors are applying the physical-evidence expectations of ISA (UK) 501 more rigorously, and the capital allowances regime — full expensing, the Annual Investment Allowance and newer first-year allowances — rewards organisations that can evidence plant and machinery at asset level and penalises those that cannot. An independent verification gives a finance team a defensible baseline before any of those conversations begin, which is precisely what CPCON exists to provide.

Our commitment

The commitment behind all of this is simple to state and demanding to keep: we make asset and inventory records true, we attach the evidence that proves it, and we leave the organisation able to keep them true. We do it as an independent specialist — no audit opinions to protect, no software licences to sell — so the only interest we are serving is an accurate record. Thirty years and 4,500 projects are not a marketing line; they are the reason the methodology is settled, the reason our teams are our own, and the reason a UK client gets the same senior discipline that FTSE-scale and Fortune-500 organisations already rely on. To discuss your estate, reach us through the contact page.