Why Your Accountant is So Expensive!
                     Why Your Accountant 
is So Expensive!
Have you ever wondered why your accountant charges 
so much even though you're paying a bookkeeper? Your 
accountant doesn’t even pretend to be grateful that 
you’ve made life so easy; in fact, they’re on a 
permanent war footing with your bookkeeper.
Your accountant says it’s your bookkeeper’s fault that 
your accounting costs aren’t falling. Your bookkeeper 
says she doesn’t know what the accountant could be 
talking about. She’s diligently entered all the data, 
you’ve watched her do it every month. It can’t possibly 
be her.
Except it can. And in 90 percent of cases, it is.
We know that’s a hard truth to face. You’ve known your 
bookkeeper for so long you can’t remember when she 
started. She comes to the office every month and chops 
down that pile of unentered receipts and invoices. 
Things only get more than a few weeks—a month at 
most—behind when she’s on holiday or one of the kids 
is sick. But she’s like a friend. You and your staff have 
coffee with her, you know about her family, she’s come 
to the Christmas party.
You probably can’t say the same about your accountant.
And because your life got easier when someone else 
started dealing with that mountain of paperwork and 
data entry, you’ve probably never asked whether your 
bookkeeper has any qualifications. She advertised 
herself as a bookkeeper, you liked her, you booked her 
to come in once a month, the paper mountain got 
smaller, and she’s been coming ever since.
But there’s no mandatory training for bookkeepers. 
Anyone can set up a bookkeeping business, and it’s 
attractive: be your own boss, flexible work you can fit 
around other commitments.
What you don’t see, your accountant does. Unqualified 
bookkeepers make mistakes that are time-consuming 
(therefore expensive) to fix. Your books have to be gone 
through with a fine-tooth comb because they’re full of 
mistakes. You think you’re sending your accountant 
clean records that should take half an hour to tick off. 
What your accountant sees is still a shoe box of 
receipts, it’s just not in paper form. And that virtual 
shoe box needs to be unpacked and re-sorted.
That extra accounting expense is just the visible cost. 
The invisible cost is that you could have a much better 
view of your business, information you can use to make 
decisions.
In business, “visibility” means financial visibility. When 
you know your financials, you can make informed 
decisions. And when you need to make crucial 
decisions ever more frequently, that means knowing 
your financials to the day, not the month. Relying on 
months-old financial information is like trying to drive 
forwards using the rear-view mirror.
When your bookkeeper drops by monthly to do data 
entry, your books are at least that much out of date. 
Not that it matters how recent they are if they’re not 
accurate in the first place.
It might always have been like this, but it doesn’t have 
to be. With cloud-based systems and automated data 
entry, your books can be almost up-to-the-minute. And 
when qualified BAS and tax agents are preparing your 
books, supervised by managers who are themselves 
accountants, your bookkeeper and your existing 
accountant can work productively.
Bookkeepers and accountants being at war is a 
common circumstance, but it isn’t inevitable. If 
accountants wanted to do bookkeeping, they’d have 
bookkeepers on staff and try to persuade you to use 
them. If bookkeepers wanted to be accountants, they 
could take the training and qualify. So if your 
accountant has a problem with your bookkeeper, 
there’s likely something to it.
In our experience, when accountants don't have to 
clean up books that are supposedly already clean, they 
save about 30 percent of their time.
Your natural instinct might be to find a qualified 
bookkeeper who will work seamlessly with your 
accountant—that’s us—and use it to negotiate a 
reduction in your accountant’s fees. We’ve also seen, 
however, has been that the real benefit unlocked by 
getting your books up-to-the-minute and accurate is 
that you can take your relationship with your 
accountant up a level.
Your accountant can use the time to liaise with your 
bookkeeper without adding to your bill. And more 
importantly, your accountant will have time to work 
with you on your business. Instead of wasting time (and 
your money) double-checking what should have been 
done right in the first place, your accountant can be 
helping you improve the vital statistics of your business 
(like cashflow) and advising you on achieving your 
vision for the business.
If that vision is to have a modern, competitive business, 
then you need to be working with suppliers and 
advisors who are modern and competitive. When it 
comes to bookkeeping, that means:
Showing a professional commitment to their work by 
getting qualified
Being managed by qualified accountants
Practising what they preach when it comes to following 
processes that make sense today, not processes that 
worked 10 years ago
If that sounds like the way you’d like your bookkeeper 
to work, call us today!