Getting the Best from Your Accountants
Accountants can be valuable members of your financial team, but wealthy investors often get frustrated by their accountants or don’t use them to their full potential. This post offers some ideas about how to work with your accountants so they can become more valuable to your financial life.
Accountants are Busy
The first thing to keep in mind when talking about how to deal with your accountant is to acknowledge that good accountants are busy and high priced. To have the best working relationship with your accountant, you must act strategically and keep their own interests in mind.
Outline Your Goals
Before anything else, start by listing what you want to achieve by working with your accountant. Also think about the type of accountant you want. Common themes are:
– someone I can call to ask tax questions
– mid career that can grow with me
– someone part of a mid to larger firm who works with a team or someone independent?
– can advise me in cross border tax issues
– speak about planning for intergenerational wealth transfer
Conduct a Search or Review your Current Tax Advisor
The best way to find a new accountant is to draw on your professional network and the network of your family office.
Help your network make the best referral by communicating what type of accountant you’re looking for. Ask your professional network questions like, “I’m looking for an accountant who can work with my entire family to manage our annual tax filings, and also provide us with advice relating to our US holdings”.
Task your family office with identifying 3 potential tax advisors and have introductory calls with each.
Interviewing potential accountants will involve describing your tax structure (persons, holdcos, foundation, investments, etc). This introductory call is also an opportunity to set expectations. This way, the potential accountant can understand how you conduct business and see if your personalities match.
Setting Expectations
Helping your accountant understand what you expect from the working relationship is vitally important. Don’t be afraid to be explicit about requiring an in person (or virtual) annual review. Be willing to pay for the time it takes your accountant to conduct this review and use it as an opportunity to build rapport and trust.
Set expectations about responding to e-mail or phone inquires, and let your accountant know what method of communication you prefer. Some accountants prefer to only give opinions over the phone, while others are willing to provide advice via e-mail.
Personality Matters
Your accountant should be someone you trust to look after your best interests and provide you with candid advice. To build this trust, you must also invest your own time in getting to know your accountant. This means caring about their success and wellbeing too. If you make dealing with your accountant fun and productive, not confrontational, you’ll get better results.
Annual Review
Having an in-person (or virtual) annual review with your accountant is best practice. An annual review can be a discussion with your accountant once per year where they provide you with new ideas and recommendations. By receiving recommendations from your accountant BEFORE tax filing time, you’ll be able to get ahead of future problems before the time crunch of filing deadlines.
Stay Organized
Getting the best out of your accountant is easier when you’re organized yourself. This means keeping your tax records in a systematic and accessible way. This also means keeping the books of your personal finances and those of your holdcos and foundation up to date as well. Handing your accountant a shoe box of paper once per year is a bad approach.
Best practice is to do proper bookkeeping using an online program such as Quickbooks or Xero. Some accountants provide bookkeeping services in-house, while others will refer you to a bookkeeping service. Your family office can also keep your books and records up to date and organized.
Family Office Advantage
Our family office will keep a shared drive organized with all your tax records, so they can be easily accessed by your advisors. We also provide bookkeeping services that make tax filing much easier and accurate.
Please contact us if you would like to learn more about how our family office services can help you get the best from your tax advisors.