Episode Details

The difference between a great and an average accountant can be significant. Not only is tax one of your biggest annual expenses, but a great accountant should be able to proactively identify other financial opportunities, in addition to tax-saving measures.

Typically, the more complex your financial situation is (e.g. if you are self-employed, running a business, have a trust or SMSF, etc.), the more you have to gain from having the right accountant. That said, working with a great accountant is in everyone’s best interest.

How do you know if your accountant is great or not?

It’s difficult for clients to tell whether their accountant is proactively looking for, and has identified, all financial opportunities. The reality is, you don’t know, what you don’t know.

To help you, I have listed below some common traits or behaviours that may indicate if your accountant is great or not!

This is a common complaint by many people. A lack of timely responses causes two problems.

Firstly, it suggests that they have too much work, are under-staffed or have poor organisational skills. Neither of these things will allow them sufficient time and space to be able to provide you with proactive advice – because they will always be (reactively) rushing onto their next task.

Secondly, it will discourage you from seeking their advice or keeping them updated about changes in your circumstances. However, if you know your accountant is fast to respond to emails, then you will be encouraged to run things past them. Doing so will give your accountant more scope to add value.

It should come as no surprise that preparing the same tax return, year-after-year can be repetitive work. That said, its dangerous to fall into autopilot mode because if you make a mistake or miss an item one year, you will continue to repeat that mistake in subsequent years.

To combat this risk, good accounting firms regularly rotate staff so that the same person is not preparing the same work many years in a row – and also have well defined review procedures.

If your accountant rarely asks you questions or for additional information during the return preparation process, then it could be a sign that they are running on autopilot.

Great accountants have a very broad amount of knowledge and experience including tax planning (of course!), investments, superannuation, business acquisitions and optimisation, insurance and so on. They have learnt a lot through observing past client decisions.

This puts them in a position to be able to identify opportunities for their clients. But this process must be embedded in their processes and systems. For example, at the end of completing each job, your accountant should be asking themselves “if I was in their shoes, what would I be doing or thinking about”. How often does your accountant do that?

Accountants are not known to be dynamic, forward-thinking people. But the truth is, great accountants are.

Great accountants realise that their clients don’t want to pay them to manually prepare workpapers and keep doing things the old-fashioned way. Therefore, they are constantly on the lookout for ways to automate and streamline their processes, which inevitably requires the adoption of technology. This approach allows these great accountants to spend more time on more proactive work.

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