How To Choose The Right Accountant For Your Start-up Or Small Business?

Regardless of its size, your business is an outcome of your efforts and professional acumen. Quite naturally, you would like to maintain its accounts seamlessly and that’s where professional assistance is required. Even if you are managing a start-up and the scale of operations is low, you should consider hiring a professional accountant.

A professional and skilled accountant will manage all your business finances to keep the business healthy and maintain the cash flow. Well, you should always look for someone who will suit your business terms and policies.

Accountants can be hired from accounting firms Perth. Amongst the most professional accountants, some oversee tax returns for individuals or companies in a particular business field, while others work in a particular tax area. If you think that you’re capable of appointing an accountant, you should decide which type of accountant you should hire.

Things you should consider first while hiring an accountant?

While hiring an accountant for your start-up or small business is important, you must always consider a few factors when you appoint an expert.

• First, you should know their location to see whether it can be feasible with your business needs.
• Second, you have to look for the workload of your business and how can you divide it for the sake of that person.
• And lastly, you have to check whether the accountant is familiar with different aspects and programming of the accounting software that your business uses.

Why will you need a tax agent?

As a businessman, you will love to get maximum tax returns. And according to a survey, when tax season commences in Australia, about 70% of the businessmen appoint a professional tax accountant for better service, convenience, and peace of mind. But, speaking honestly, not all Australians are familiar with tax accountants.

Taxes vary according to business structures as well as business turnover, but generally, for a sole trader, GST is not applicable. Still, it is always recommended to seek advice from a sole trader accountant to know about the specific tax deductions a sole trader can claim. Apart from tax advice, an experienced professional can also provide valuable inputs on budgeting and other financial aspects.

How to choose the right accountant for your business?

While choosing an ingenious accountant for your business, consider the following steps to get a suitable one.

• Check their qualifications: For your business accounting, you will need a team of accountants who are highly experienced and skilled. In Australia, there are generally three types of qualifications that are assigned to the accountants. The most skilled accountants are Chartered Accountants (CAs) who do advanced auditing and tax. They are more strategic in their approach. Certified Practicing Accountants (CPAs) are skilled in general-purpose accounting. The third type, i.e. the Institute of Public Accountants deals with less complex business finance.

• Check their locations: Accounting is not a simple one-liner job. Different steps of accounting may require a face-to-face conversation between the business owner and the accountant. So, it is extremely important to see the location of the accountant so that you can discuss matters with your accountant at any time.

• Look at their priorities: As the owner of your company, you will not want to be your accountant’s second priority, right? To be very honest, this is very difficult to tell as you cannot point out easily whether your accountant will give the deserved attention to your clients, purchases, tax return, or superannuation unless you appoint that person. If he struggles to give you the necessary information, then you may consider imposing some strictness in your approach.

• Familiarity with your industry situation: Whenever you hire a professional accountant from an accounting firm, ask them whether that person had previously worked for a similar company. Every industry sets its own standards regarding tax returns, purchases. So, if a certain accountant knows the exact condition of the industry that your company fits in, he or she can provide you with the maximum tax return. And not just tax, an accountant with prior experience in a certain industry can also provide help on other topics too like, cash flow analysis, successful budget planning, and financial applications.

• Relevant expertise: Always look for someone who has valuable experience in preparing tax returns and also other financial documents for companies that are similar to the one owned by you. If your company uses cloud-based accounting software, you have to look at whether the accountant is familiar with all the programming.

• Check their fees: A professional accountant will always charge you a decent fee. You have to see their fee structure and then decide whether you wish to comply with that or not.

• Do background research: This is a must-do job for any business owner. Talk to the accountant’s previous clients. You can use professional services for this purpose but you can also get important references from the accountant himself if the person is truly genuine. Not only will this give you some insights about the person’s capabilities but also a first-hand report of his relationship with clients.

• Look for technical knowledge: Account practitioners should possess a great level of knowledge about accounting and using business software so that their clients can get the most from their software packages.

• Connectivity with the accountant: You will want to appoint an accountant who can serve you in the long run. That’s why it is important to see if you can easily connect with the accountant, not on professional terms, but on personal levels, too. Mutual trust and respect should be built between a client and an accountant so that they can openly communicate about business benefits.
• Intention to save your money: A sharp accountant will always benefit you with a maximum return of tax. As a business owner, you will always love to get money back into your account, don’t you? But, be very careful about one thing. That is, you should appoint someone who is extremely aware of the tax laws otherwise it will be your responsibility to pay a penalty if anything happens.

Ending note

Start-up management needs profound attention and prompt actions. When it comes to account management, there’s no denying the importance of the best accountant in Perth. Get in touch with them, and you can focus on core business operations while they take care of critical accounting tasks.