I know this is a strange posting for me to make, but it is prompted by a recent article by Kristen Fischer on Freelance Switch.
Kirsten covers the basics in this posting, such as sort your receipts, compile forms and believe it or not get an accountant.
So this got me thinking, do accountants do enough to help their clients, due to the numbers of clients many accountants have I fear the honest answer is no.
So what can we accountants do to help? Well at Holden Associates we provide, free of charge, online accounting software which we tailor to your business and this deals with giving you a set way of recording everything, it also allows for being paperless with the ability to scan invoices in.
Is this enough though? I think not, one of the comments on Kristen’s posting mentions:
it will be a huge advantage to you to be working with the accountant who truly understands the idiosyncrasies of YOUR business. I’m so pleased I found an accountant who specializes in “creative types” and focuses his efforts on serving the specific tax/accounting needs of such individuals.
This is true, it does make life easier if you have an accountant who can relate to what you do and how your industry works.
What else can your accountant do, well sometimes we need to communicate better, we know what we are doing and talking about and sometimes we need to remember clients have not had our training and years of experience of different business and industry types.
We also need to do more to ‘show our worth’, there are many small businesses, early years businesses and bootstrapping businesses out there who all say the same thing, an accountant is expensive, I’m not big enough yet but maybe next year and other similar statements.
Yes many accountants have a minimum charge, we are a business too, but have you ever considered what it is costing you by not hiring a professionally trained, qualified and experienced accountant to guide you through all the red tape and complexity of the tax system. We may even save you money, a casual conversation I had with a client last week while they were doing the VAT saved them c.£40,000 in VAT that quarter, due to their lack of knowledge surrounding the administration of the ‘cash accounting’ VAT system.
Although such savings are not common place there are still many smaller saving that we can help business owners make, and not just at tax time.
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Simon Tate (Who am I?)
1 year ago
Both the work and perception of accountants is commonly undervalued, perhaps from the days when audits were mandatory for all companies irrespective of their size.
In many of these situations, the usefulness of the accountant’s work which was to state to a business owner-manager that the accounts which they were legally required to present to themselves were true and fair, was limited.
Since changes in the audit exemption thresholds the impression that accountants provide little actual value still persists despite a more competitive business environment. Accountants have had to change themselves and work harder to attract and retain clients.
This has been beneficial to small businesses in the main and lead to a far greater pro-active approach being adopted by the accountancy profession.