Your accountant should deliver enough value to justify the cost that your business bears for retaining their services. Having said that, it is in many cases the business that doesn’t extract enough value from their CPA. Are you happy with your current CPA and are you getting enough value from them? If not, we have some recommendations.
How is your accountant helping your small business?
Do you utilize a CPA for tax preparation work or does the scope of work expand to other areas such as strategic planning? If you only contact your CPA for filing returns or for one-off tax questions, you’re probably not obtaining enough value from them. So, how can you get more? First, it’s important to understand the services that your accountant offers. In most cases, CPAs and Enrolled agents do not just provide tax preparation, bookkeeping, payroll and other related services to their clients. Rather, they are trusted business advisors that can offer strategic advice to their clients. A properly filed tax return is really the bear minimum of what they offer their clients.
What services can be outsourced to your accountant?
Many businesses may need a full-time bookkeeper or internal accountant. However, others that are small and nimble can outsource bookkeeping work to their accountant through a cloud-based solution. This method will allow both the accountant and the business to have real-time access to the books and records. In addition, your staff will be able to re-focus on higher priority and potentially revenue generating activities. Lastly, it will likely cost less.
Your accountant can help you identify new financial opportunities
Many CPAs can serve in progressive financial roles by performing value-added financial planning and analysis. Specifically, they can identify potential financial opportunities based on their analysis of key financial data and business goals. For instance, if they know that you would like to grow your business by expanding through new store locations, they can guide you with sourcing and identifying the best source of capital to ensure a positive return of investment. The same logic would apply if your company was going through a cost-reduction process.
Are there limitations?
If you find that you are not able to extract more value from your accountant and none of the above recommendations are working or your accountant isn’t giving you the time of day, it’s time to make a change. While we understand that businesses are hesitant in changing accountants, it’s more costly to the business not to in this case. Your accountant is obligated to transfer all client files to you. Furthermore, it doesn’t hurt to see what other providers are avaiable in the marketplace. If you don’t want to go through the due diligence process yourself, you can simply submit a request here to receive multiple quotes and responses from business accountants in our network.
More tax questions? Browse answers or ask tax questions online. You can also find accountants online here.
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