What you should look for in choosing your accountant
Finding a great accountant is not easy so we have drawn up a list of things that we think you should demand from your accountant in today’s business world. The ones that are achieving all of these are relatively few and far between but we believe they should at least be taking measures to try to raise the bar. We are of course talking about your external qualified professional adviser here, the one who should normally be regared as the first person you turn to with a business or tax issue.
photo credit: schnaars Your accountant should be able to strengthen your business and personal cashflow by considering using better tax planning to…
•Pay no tax on the profits from new products/services/divisions for 5-10 years
•Pay as little tax as possible when extracting profits from your company
•Cut your corporation tax bills
•Cut your personal income tax bills
•Reclaim much of the income tax you paid in recent years
•Halve your stamp duty and capital gains tax bills – and perhaps even eliminate them
•Claim your full Tax Credit entitlement (it is surprising how much you can claim with specialist help)
•Use IHT and care home fee planning to put extra cash in your bank during your lifetime
All of the above are of course legal and are appropriate given the right personal and/ or business circumstances.
If you do have an accountant and they tell you that these things are not possible please ask them exactly what they mean. Are they fully up to date with the tax strategy referred to and know for a fact that they will not fit with your particular circumstances or are they not aware of the specific strategy.
Your accountant should be able to Provide Expert Business Advice :
•Giving you a diagnostic review and report to identify the key options for strengthening your cashflow
•Explore the 20 sources of cash to see which have the most potential for you
•Giving you a performance measurement and improvement system – and help you summarise everything that really matters on a balanced Scorecard or One Page Plan – to give you all the information you need to make better decisions and get better results
•Helping you understand and manage your breakeven point so you are more able to survive falls in demand
•Benchmarking you against others in your industry to identify the areas where you can most easily improve
•Creating an initial improvement action plan covering all the key areas listed here
•Attending regular meetings with you, and use a BoardView style methodology to help you continually update your action plan in the light of new issues, information and opportunities as they arise
•Producing regular cashflow forecasts to ensure your plans can be funded & you do not get into financial difficulties
•Allowing you free access to a library of relevant “Beat the recession” resources eg videos, software, reports etc
•Strengthening your cashflow by making more profitable sales & getting paid more quickly
•Identifying which of the 8 key profit drivers has the greatest potential for you
•Reviewing the 23 profit strategies that lie behind the 8 profit drivers – prioritise and action them
•Identifying and managing your profitability by customer and/or product line – so that you can build on your higher profit areas and deal with your lower profit areas
•Analysing your sales pipeline – & use sales improvement software such as SSTW to identify how to drive sales up
•Evaluating alternative pricing strategies using software such as SSTW – since getting your pricing right is usually the fastest and easiest way to increase the profitability of sales
•Reviewing the 43 ways to improve your debtor collection
If your accountant cannot help you fully in all of the above key areas, or you want a second opinion for free from a professional accountant who can, simply visit our Contact page and let us know. No matter where you are in the UK we are able to put you in touch with someone who is regularly seeking to do all of the above. You see we work with a lot of accountants ourselves so if you are a UK qualified accountant, member of a CCAB body and you think you can deliver on the above get in touch if you would like to be considered for possible recognition under our Joint Venture scheme. If you are qualified and think you may achieve some but not all of the above service levels or you simply have no idea how to reach any of them but would like a confidential chat about how you might raise your game don’t be afraid to Contact us. We can probably help.