An Accountant is a practitioner of accountancy, which is the measurement, disclosure or provision of assurance about financial information that helps managers, investors, tax authorities and other decision makers make resource allocation decisions.
The word "Accountant" is derived from the French "Compter' which took its origin from the Latin "Computare". The word was formerly written in English as "Accomptant", but in process of time the word, which was always pronounced by dropping the "p", became gradually changed both in pronunciation and in orthography to its present form.
I find the above description of an accountant still typifies many accountants these days, which is a shame.
‘An Accountant is a practitioner of accountancy, which is the measurement, disclosure or provision of assurance about financial information’, it is all very well and good making sure the books balance, but why stop there?
An accountant to me is someone who not only gives assurance about financial information but someone who goes far beyond this, an accountant should be someone who gives business advice and support as standard.
Let’s face it, an accountant during the course of their working life will have contact with thousands of different businesses and business people, well don’t you think this should give them a lot of business knowledge, knowledge that they should be sharing and passing onto their clients?
Unfortunately again and again we see this does not happen, why not? Who knows!
At Accountants, Business & Tax Consultants – Holden Associates we truly believe an accountant is far more than someone who will give ‘assurance about financial information’, to us this statement is a given.
An accountant should not only be dealing with your annual compliance such as self assessment tax returns, annual accounts etc, an accountant should be working with you in a pro-active manner.
So, how do Accountants, Business & Tax Consultants – Holden Associates do it different?
Well to give you a taster, for a start we think it is a given that we compile and give assurance concerning annual events such as tax returns and accounts.
We provide every client with the £FREE use of our online accounting software which is powered by the leading SaaS supplier winweb.
It is through this online bookkeeping software that we are able to get your financial data under control, and this gives us our first insight into how your business is doing.
Now your bookkeeping function is under control, whether you maintain it or whether we do, we are able to look at up-to-date accounts, not three, six or twelve months old, but 3 seconds old accounting information, we are now able to start looking at trends, trends which you may never have known existed.
Taxation, yes everyone has to pay tax, but are you paying too much, has your accountant ever mentioned regular reviews of your tax affairs? No, well this is another area we cover; with some new clients we find we have to do this immediately because no one has ever reviewed it. We don’t wait for you to ask us, we tell you!
I hope the above gives you an idea of what I think an accountant is, I know it differs to the usual description, but I think it is what needs to become the new description if business both small and medium sized is going to progress and thrive in the years and decades to come.
