Tips for choosing your accountant

Posted by Team Maria on March 2nd, 2019

We are going in this article 6 important topics that must be addressed when you need to choose a chartered accountant, and give you our point of view.

These tips for choosing a good accountant are the result of our experience in public accounting.

Proximity to your accountant

Geographical proximity is an important criterion for choosing a chartered accountant. Even if the means of communication are effective today (call-conferencing, dematerialized exchanges ...), the physical appointments have no equivalent to exchange with your accountant.

The fees of the accountant

Too often, the entrepreneur who needs an accountant chooses the professional who offers him the lowest fees.

This choice is explicable because one wishes, especially in a creation or a recovery, to control its costs as much as possible, but it is generally at the expense of other criteria: few contacts, few advices...

On the other hand, it is also necessary to make sure that the chartered accountant proposes to you a fee which is in adequacy with the services provided and the average prices of the market or in default, that it is able to justify these amounts.

The services offered by the accountant

This is probably one of the most important criteria for choosing your accountant: the range of services he can offer you.

This subject must also be addressed right away at the risk of wasting time unnecessarily.

For example, if your company has interests in other companies and must prepare consolidated accounts, your accountant must be able to do so.

The importance of the agreement with his accountant

To build a relationship of trust over time with your accountant, it is important that you get along well.

Generally, the first appointments make it possible to know if the current can well pass or not.

Technologies used by the accountant

This criterion for choosing a chartered accountant is even more important if you use new technologies yourself. Examples:

• When working in any paperless, your accountant must be able to do the same,
• if you are in e-commerce, your accountant must be able to recover data from your business management ...

To have an accountant recommend you

Getting a recommendation from a person who knows a chartered accountant is very interesting, it increases the chances of finding a professional who matches what you are looking for.

Succeed in getting advice on the accountant

To choose an accountant, there is no better way than to obtain one or more opinions on the firm in question. If you have the possibility, try to inform yourself about your interlocutor.

Be careful though because in a firm, we can very well have good accountants and worse.