Under what circumstances would you switch accountant? Would you look for an alternative if your needs weren’t being met? Of course meeting one person’s needs doesn’t guarantee that that any firm would meet someone else’s—you can’t please all of the people all of the time—but say you were a small business expecting the following, can you say categorically that your needs are being met with your current accountant?

• Is your current accountant available whenever you need to talk to him or her?
• Do you have a named account manager?
• If you call your accountant does your account manager call you back almost immediately, at least within the day, but more often within a couple of hours of calling?
• Do you get cloud bookkeeping and accounting software provided as part of your accountancy package?
• Are you satisfied that your accountant is the proactive tax-planning expert that you believed you’d signed up with?
• Is it guaranteed that you’ll never fall foul of a fine through professional negligence?
• Last but not least, do you benefit from weekend opening and evening meetings by appointment?

Steps to Change Accountant

The accounting profession has a clear procedure in place for clients who decide to change accountants.

Give Notice: If you decided to change accountant, write to existing accountant and give notice. A brief email should send with all the information and also include the new accountant in communication.

Professional Clearance: Once you have given notice your new accountant will write to your existing accountant to request professional clearance. This is part of due diligence procedures.

Due Diligence: All accountants operating under the compliance structure of an accounting body must conduct due diligence before taking on new clients.

Transfer of Records: When you are done with above procedures your existing accountant will transfer all the records to your new accountants. If your records are held electronically then this should happen quickly.

If you can answer yes to all of these things then maybe your needs are being met, which is fabulous! However, if the list above got you wondering and some of the questions about your needs made you sit up and think, I don’t get that!, then you might be pleased for this thumbs up:

Target Accounting is the fairly priced, expert, digital chartered accountants with branches nationwide that you might be looking for as an alternative.