I recently held a workshop with a range of different business owners and I asked them what their relationship with their accountant was like and what they thought was missing. None of the answers given surprised me. Perhaps you feel like this as well.
One participant said : “I would like more feedback. As it stands, the only feedback I receive is annually and effectively the feedback is purely tax related. Now that I think about it – I think I have trained my accountants to only give this feedback as generally the questions I ask my accountant are:
- How are the tax returns going?
- What is the liability going to be?
- How much is this all going to cost!”
So maybe in some ways we get what we ask for and maybe we don’t ask enough questions, or more importantly, the right questions to get the feedback we actually need. The feedback that is actually useful to our business.
The feedback from your accountant is important but it is directly related to what you are asking for. A lot of the time small business owners are really sensitive in terms of how much their accountant charges them so if you are going to pay for that time, rather spend it asking the right questions.
Don’t let them dominate the conversation in terms of what’s happening in your tax return and where you are getting deductions. Ask them to tell you how much tax you have to pay, and that’s it – who cares about the details. You don’t have to learn about the tax law, he needs to know the tax law and that’s why he is the accountant. Rather spend the time with him asking him the more pertinent questions like:
- How is my business performance like this year compared to last year?
- What can you see that could improve my cash flow?
- If you had to give me 3 areas of my business I had to look at, what would you suggest I do?
And remember, it’s really important to wrap up your year end as soon as possible after June. If you are seeing your accountant a few months after year end – for example six months after year end, the first months’ worth of information is already 18 months old – it doesn’t apply anymore. You should actually be having these conversations more regularly during the year and looking at current figures more regularly. Reviewing your business performance is not something that should be done once a year with your accountant, if you want your business to grow NOW – it’s something you should be doing NOW.
