There is a specific way most accountants approach their relationship with established business clients, and I think it is wrong.
Not corrupt. Not lazy. Wrong.
The standard relationship looks like this. The accountant does the compliance work, the annual financial statements, the tax returns, the GST. They do it competently, sometimes with a tax-saving suggestion attached. Once a year, usually around the time the accounts are signed off, the accountant has a meeting with the owner. They go through the numbers from the year that has just ended. They talk about a few things to watch. They confirm the tax position. The meeting takes an hour, maybe ninety minutes. Then they do not speak again for twelve months, unless something urgent comes up.
This is what most owners expect from their accountant. It is what most accountants think the relationship is supposed to be.
I think it is the wrong shape entirely.
The problem is not the work. The compliance work is fine. The annual review is fine. The problem is the timing. Almost everything an accountant talks about with an owner in that annual meeting is about the year that has already happened. The decisions that mattered have already been made. The pricing structure that ran for the year has already produced its margin. The customer concentration that built up over the twelve months has already been built. The owner is being shown the rear-view mirror, in great detail, and being asked to nod at it.
What the owner actually needs is someone looking at the windscreen.
The decisions that will determine the next twelve months of the business are not in the financial statements. They are in the conversations the owner is about to have. The pricing call they are weighing for the new financial year. The hire they are about to commit to. The customer they are about to give an extension to. The expansion they are about to fund. Those decisions are happening now, and they are being made with whatever data the owner has in their head, because their accountant is not in the room.
The annual meeting model has accountants positioned exactly where their judgment is least useful. After the fact, looking back, on decisions that are already in the rear-view. It is like a doctor who only sees a patient at the autopsy. The information is accurate. The timing is wrong.
I think the right shape of the relationship is the opposite. Accountants should be most involved in the decisions before they are made, not after. The compliance work matters and has to happen. But the senior accountant’s time, the judgment, the experience, that should be deployed where it can actually change the outcome. In the conversations the owner is having about the year that has not happened yet.
This is not a new idea. CFOs of larger businesses operate exactly this way. They are inside the decisions, weekly, looking forward. The reason most privately owned businesses do not have this is not that they cannot afford it. It is that the industry has settled into a model where strategic financial thinking is sold as an add-on to compliance, rather than as the actual point.
I think that is backwards. The compliance is the by-product. The strategic conversation is the work.
If your accountant only sees you once a year, and the meeting is mostly about the year that has already ended, the relationship is shaped the way the industry has shaped it. Not the way it should be.
It is worth asking what a different shape would look like.
Murray.
