Is It Time To Upgrade Your Accountant?

Tracy Mayor -- Expert Business Source, 2/10/2007 11:37:00 AM

When was the last time you spoke with your accountant? If your answer is, “This time last year” or “the last time quarterly taxes were due,” you may be due yourself – for an accountant upgrade, that is.

All businesses need proactive accounting, but none more so than small but growing companies, says Michael Alter, president of SurePayroll Inc., a payroll outsourcer for companies with 100 employees or fewer. But an accountant who calls up and says, “Hey, it’s tax time again. Send me your stuff,” does not qualify as being proactive, he adds.

Basic number-crunching and tax services may be sufficient for startups, but established businesses need more from their accountants in the way of strategic business advice or technological know-how. “It is absolutely possible to outgrow your accountant,” Alter says.

Whatever your size, your accountant should already be offering some or all of the following services, according to the National Association of Small Business Accountants:

• Payroll
• Financial record keeping
• Tax planning
• Start-up services
• Bookkeeping
• Support for QuickBooks, Quicken or other small-business accounting software
• Tax preparation

Beyond those basic services, an accountant who’s invested in helping, or better yet, leading your business growth should be able to:

• Offer industry-specific advice
• Ask probing questions about your business goals
• Actively analyze your financials
• Work with you to convert that analysis into an actionable business strategy

“A good accountant should act like a business consultant,” Alter says, and should become “one of your most trusted advisors as you grow, more so than even your attorney or banker.”

When shopping for a new accountant – or trying to determine if the one you employ now is adequate – Alter advises you to look for someone who:

• Can take you beyond a basic accounting program like Quicken into a more robust, perhaps industry-specific, software system.
• Addresses not just what happened to your business financially in the past 12 months, but works with you to plan future growth by drawing up budgets, mapping out financial goals, and identifying business problems and offering solutions.
• Has a deep understanding of specific business strategies that will help your company expand. Ideally, your accountant should have experience and knowledge of your particular industry as well as contacts and connections he or she is willing to share.
• Has the technological expertise to bring you to the next level. While it may seem counterintuitive to expect your accountant to be an IT expert, Alter points out that because technology and business strategy have become so entwined, your accountant must have an understanding of basic IT issues to help you chart a growth strategy.

Now it’s up to you to determine if your accountant is up to the task.

Tracy Mayor is a freelance writer based in Hamilton, Mass.