Edmonton Accountant | How Accounting Prices Are Structured

Since tax planning is an extremely important aspect of business, business owners should be sure that they are choosing an accountant that does planning. They should not make the assumption that all accountants do this says Edmonton accountant, because it’s simply not true. Accountants tend to specialize in the areas of business that they have a lot of experience in. Accountants that don’t end up doing many plans, end up not being very good at doing them at all. Business owners should not only ask different accounting firms if they do planning but how many plans do they do in a year. Accountants that do over 100 each year, should be seen as extremely good at doing them. However, just because a business does many of them, doesn’t mean those plans are great. Once a business owner has satisfied themselves that the accounting firm is a potential candidate, what they should do is then go in to the accounting firm, and asked them to see what a finished plan looks like. If the accounting firm will not let them take a look at a plan, that should be very telling. Edmonton accountant says that this is extremely important, even though a business owner may not know exactly what they are looking at, they should note how many pages the document is. It should be more than one or two pages a significant document should start at about 30 pages. The accounting firm should be able to point out to the business owner all of the various recommendations they made to the business owner, as well as how the accountant in the business owner are going to measure it to see if it is working. It’s extremely important that both the accountant and the business owner understands what deliverables they are going to be looking for when seeing if this plan has worked. A business plan that does not have any measurable attached, is not a very good plan at all. At the end of the meeting, business owners should get a good sense of whether it is a meaningful business plan that would be able to help them in their business.

By being very picky and choosy when it comes to hiring an accountant for their business plan, business owners can be very certain that they end up with an accountant that they will be able to work well with, and end up with a plan that can help them not only increase their business, but help save money on taxes.

With all of the challenges that face entrepreneurs in business today says Edmonton accountant, they can minimize a lot of those challenges by choosing the right accountant. 50% of all businesses go out of business within five years, and there are three main reasons why. 42% said they couldn’t attract the right customers, 29% said they ran out of money, and 23% couldn’t hire the right employees. The hiring the right accountant, businesses can get the best tax advice that will have them keeping their expenses low by minimizing the amount of taxes that they have to pay. That can help them increase their cash flow, and avoid running out of money.

Unfortunately, Edmonton accountant says that it is often a overwhelming task to choose an accountant. If they choose the wrong one, they could be paying for inadequate services that will end up costing their business far more in the long run. If they hire the wrong accountant for their business, the business owner will get upset at not having the deliverables they were expecting. A great place to start when hiring accountants, is understanding how they price their services.

When business owners are looking to hire accountants, they may start phoning various firms to get a price. Not only is this ineffective, but it’s also very dangerous. Edmonton accountant says that CPAs actually are bound by their governing body that says they are prohibited from getting prices over the phone. Instead, they must fully and completely understand the business before they can give a price. If a business owner does that a price over the phone, they should be certain that that quote is in no way accurate.

There are three ways that accountants normally charge their clients. The first and most common way is paid by the hour. For every hour that the accountant works on a file, the client gets charged. Unfortunately this creates a strained relationship because the accountant is in the position to charge more by taking a longer amount of time. The business owner tends to end up worrying if their accountant is overcharging them, which can end up in the business owner cancelling vital services in order to save money such as planning. Business owners without a tax plan can make bad tax decisions that will cost their business more in the long run. The second way businesses get charged for accounting services, is by a flat fee per service. This is where the accounting firm has a list of services and price beside each one. Unfortunately this approach often results in additional charges of work that the accountant has completed, but falls outside of the scope of what’s included in the flat fee. Additional charges can include things like answering phone calls from CRA, sending off emails or actually filing the statement. Edmonton accountant says the last way accountants charge, is a flat monthly fee, where everything that a business owner gets work done in a month is charged one flat fee that stays the same from month-to-month. This is extremely beneficial to business owners to know exactly what they should be expecting a bill, which makes it easier to plan their cash flow around it, as well as that allows them to have a complete understanding of what services are included in the price.