Donor procedures. Accounting standards. National statute. Your own internal rules — grant procedures, procurement thresholds, financial instructions. And, underneath it all, good practice. Compliance Desk checks a transaction against every layer and returns the exact citation that backs each finding. IPSAS Drills builds the accounting reflexes underneath. Both by a practitioner currently embedded in a Pacific Treasury, in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian.
Nothing here asks to be taken on faith.
§ 01 · The basics, properly done
Pavitt Public Finance helps public sector finance teams get the basics properly done, in places where the starting point is low and the standards are real. Pay the staff. Record the assets. Reconcile the books. File the statements that survive audit. Prove the spend followed the rules. The unglamorous work that quietly keeps a government running.
That's the category we take seriously. Tools and content built around it. Not long PDFs, not expensive engagements, not a certificate at the end.
02 · Desk
Submit a transaction, or ask the question in plain language. The Desk checks it against donor procedures, IPSAS, national statute, and your organisation's own rules — and returns each finding with the citation that backs it: the paragraph in the standard, the section of the donor manual, the clause in the Act. Filed, retrievable, ready for the auditor. If the answer isn't in the source, the Desk says so. Couple this technique with inquiries for every transaction above your chosen threshold, and you have your filter for risk-based review — with the evidence to back it. The Desk's findings — especially where the source gives no answer — quickly build your risk-weighted pool for review.
03 · Drills
Short, daily practice tuned to where adoption actually stalls: opening balances that won't reconcile, IPSAS 23 grants with conditions, GFS mapping with a chart of accounts that wasn't built for it, audit working papers that don't survive review. Over 3,400 planks (questions and flashcards) across fifteen topics. Ten to fifteen minutes a day. The accounting layer is the deepest rulebook in the stack — Drills is how a team gets strong in it.
Coming soon
Evaluate the team that does the work — alongside Desk and Drills.
Learn more§ 04 · The series
Essays and short posts on getting the accounting right, proving the spend followed the rules, and the people who do the work. Pattern-level observations from current implementation work, written for practitioners. The lead column, The Compliance Check, lands weekly; IPSAS, Unfiltered continues inside it as a column. Published on Substack, cross-posted to LinkedIn, archived on this site.
The first post, “Every rule that binds it”, sets out the whole idea: a single payment answers to three rulebooks at once (the accounting standard, your own law, and the donor's manual), and the checking discipline behind every finding. English first, with batch translations to Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Russian.
Proving that donor money was administered properly — in ministries, project units, and NGOs receiving grant funds. Internal auditors, retained fiscal agents, the one officer covering five rulebooks with a checklist. Especially where the field office has no compliance function at all and headquarters is far away.
Adopting or applying IPSAS. Directors of Finance, deputy accountants-general, controllers in line ministries, project accountants in donor-funded units. Especially where the team is small, capacity is stretched, and external training is hard to access.
Firms auditing governments without a public-sector technical desk of their own — the Desk frees you from serving as the technical desk for clients you then audit. And donor headquarters reviewing field-office work remotely, or advisers supporting counterparts on reform.
§ 06 · Why this exists
In practice, compliance is patchy. An officer works down a checklist for one rulebook, marks the item compliant, and passes it on. Some items get skipped altogether; a sample audit months later is the only check on whether the work was really done. In a remote field office there is often no compliance officer at all — the fallback is flying someone in from headquarters, expensive and usually behind. Trust in the field office's work erodes, or never forms.
Most "AI accounting" tools are IFRS tools with public-sector content bolted on. They handle the standards that matter most in public sector (IPSAS 23, 24, 32, 35) at surface level, they're willing to invent paragraph references that don't exist — and none of them have read your donor's manual, your PFM Act, or your procurement rules.
And the basics are the same everywhere. The five places that stall IPSAS adoption in the Solomon Islands stall it in Malawi and Bangladesh too. The industry sells regional specialisation; the actual pattern is cross-regional. These products are built around that pattern, from current implementation work in a Pacific Treasury rather than from a textbook.
§ 07 · Built by a practitioner
The products are built and maintained by Gregg Pavitt, currently embedded in the Solomon Islands Ministry of Finance and Treasury on an IPSAS implementation programme. Earlier work across Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and the Pacific, and before that, a long stretch of US municipal finance directorship work, direct and outsourced. CPA since 1991. Full CV and references on LinkedIn.
The Drills questions come from real implementation pain points. The Desk reference base is the actual sources: IPSAS 1 through the most recently issued plus IPSASB framework documents, the compliance manuals of nine donors, and — on Customised plans — your own statute, regulations, and internal procedures. Every citation is traceable to a real paragraph in a real source. If the answer isn't there, the Desk says so.
§ 07.4 · Languages
Available in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian. English, French, and Spanish content is vetted against the official IPSAS translations in each language, not machine-translated. For French- and Spanish-speaking users, both adoption paths are supported (e.g. official French IPSAS, or International IPSAS with translation to French) with citations and effective dates appropriate to each. The Portuguese and Russian interfaces are fully available, with the underlying IPSAS reference drawn from the English source.
World Bank
European Union
USAID
Millennium Challenge Corporation
DFAT (Australian Aid)
FCDOAdd a card to keep going past day 14, cancel any time. Team and ministry plans cover a single account across the whole finance team or audit staff.
Customised plans add your local statute, regulations, and accounting manual to the Desk reference base. Donor-funded pricing available where IPSAS adoption is supported by an international partner.
See full pricing →§ 09 · also available
For embedded advisory, system design, capacity building, PEFA-style diagnostics, IFMIS work, public investment management, Gregg also takes engagements directly, as Team Leader or Key Expert, alongside the software business.