A Pavitt Public Finance product
Most IPSAS adoption stalls in the same five places. Drills is built around those five places.
Opening balances that won't reconcile. IPSAS 23 grants with conditions. Consolidating donor-funded special-purpose funds. GFS-to-IPSAS mapping with a chart of accounts that wasn't designed for it. Audit working papers that don't survive review.
Over 3,400 planks (questions and flashcards) tuned to those situations. Ten to fifteen minutes a day. Within the Pavitt Public Finance toolkit, Drills is the training arm: the accounting layer is the deepest rulebook a team answers to, and Drills is how the team gets strong in it.
The pattern
A pattern I've come to expect across implementations, regardless of country or donor.
The most unglamorous work in IPSAS adoption, and the place where most adoptions quietly stall. First-time recognition of PP&E, infrastructure, biological assets, intangibles. Deemed cost when the source records have gone missing. Comparatives restated in a way the auditor will accept. It's hundreds of small decisions, and a team that hasn't drilled them gets slow.
IPSAS 23 is where small governments either get it right or end up with material audit findings every year. Grant conditions, restrictions, the difference between a stipulation and a condition, timing of recognition when a donor disburses in tranches. It's not hard once you've seen it ten times; the problem is most teams haven't seen it three.
IPSAS 35 sounds simple on the page (control, then consolidate). In practice it's whether the agency, the trust fund, the SOE, and the donor-funded special-purpose fund are inside or outside the reporting entity. Every government has its own answer, and most of them are wrong on at least one entity.
The thing that separates a clean IPSAS report from one finance ministry economists can actually use. Most charts of accounts weren't designed to support both. The mapping work is mechanical, but if you haven't drilled it you'll spend three days on something that should take three hours.
The final mile. The accounting can be right and the audit can still go badly because the working papers don't show how you got to the position. Disclosure files that survive review look a specific way, and they're built up over time by people who've done it before.
Tell us your role, your reporting basis, and what you are working on. We start you on drills appropriate to your situation, not generic exam prep.
Ten to fifteen minutes per session. Each question gives you the answer, the standard, the paragraph, and where it matters, the implementation note from real projects.
Solo users see their own progress. Team and ministry plans give the lead accountant a dashboard: who's drilling, where the team is weakest, and what to focus on next.
Full coverage
Drills are graduated by difficulty and tagged to their standards, organised around the five failure modes above plus the rest of the standards your team will meet over the course of the year.
The biggest balance sheet item — and the biggest source of audit qualifications.
Where IPSAS most differs from commercial accounting.
Pension and leave obligations done properly, with actuarial method.
Legal claims, guarantees, and PPP obligations — usually under-disclosed.
Defining the reporting entity, and the mechanics of consolidating it.
Original budget, final budget, actual — with the variance narrative auditors want.
Concessional loans, ECL staging, and government loan portfolios.
Recoverable service amount for schools, hospitals, and roads.
Putting PPP assets on balance sheet, where they belong.
Distribution stock, strategic reserves, and donated goods.
Right-of-use assets and lease liabilities under IPSAS 43.
The four primary statements, accounting policies, and prior-period errors.
First-time recognition, deemed cost, and comparative restatement.
Multi-year grants, in-kind contributions, and clawback risk.
Whole-of-government consolidation, GFS mapping, and audit working papers.
For Ministries, line ministries, and statutory bodies adopting or applying IPSAS: controllers, deputy accountants-general, project accountants. Especially useful where the team is small, capacity is stretched, and external training is hard to access.
For small and mid-size firms where government audit isn't the firm's main practice. Bring your team's IPSAS knowledge up to a level where you can sign the opinion with confidence.
For staff supporting government counterparts on IPSAS reform. Use Drills yourself; deploy it to the teams you are supporting.
Languages
Drills works in all six languages. The English, French, and Spanish content is vetted against the official IPSAS translations in each language, not machine-translated.
For French- and Spanish-speaking users specifically, Drills distinguishes between two adoption paths: countries that have adopted the official French or Spanish translation of IPSAS, and countries that use the international (English-source) IPSAS rendered in their working language. Citation paragraph numbers and effective dates differ between the two; drills are tagged to the version appropriate to your country.
The Portuguese, Russian, and Arabic interfaces are fully available, with the underlying IPSAS reference drawn from the English source (there is no separate official Portuguese, Russian, or Arabic IPSAS translation). Relevant for francophone and lusophone Africa, Spanish-speaking Latin America, the Arabic-speaking public sector across the Middle East and North Africa, and teams operating across multiple languages day to day.
Built by someone currently doing the work
Drills is written and curated by Gregg Pavitt, currently embedded in the Solomon Islands Ministry of Finance & Treasury. The five failure modes above aren't a marketing list; they're the patterns that have actually slowed implementations across the Pacific, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia. CPA since 1991. Full CV and references on LinkedIn.
World Bank
European Union
USAID
Millennium Challenge Corporation
DFAT (Australian Aid)
FCDODo I get a certificate?
Is this aligned to the current IPSAS standards?
We're a Ministry. Can we get a single account for the whole finance team?
What if I want one-on-one help on something specific?
Start with a 14-day free trial, no credit card needed to look around. Add a card to keep going past day 14. Cancel any time before the first charge.
For teams of five or more, ministries, or audit firms wanting a single account for the whole staff, see team and organisation pricing.
Goes together
Drills builds your team's reflexes on the failure modes above. Desk handles the hard cases — and checks whole transactions for compliance against donor rules, statute, and your own procedures. Bench — coming soon — shows where the capability gaps are. The Series, Rules, Unfiltered, covers the patterns at system level.