Is Your Accountant Good Enough For Your Business?

From our experience in working with small businesses, we have seen that one of the main reasons why many small businesses remain small and stagnant in growth is that they do not perceive the value of retaining a good CPA. Small businessess often see a CPA as the tax preparer with whom they only need to visit once every year to file their taxes. In fact, if a tax return is what you can get from your CPA or accountant, then may be you should think about retaining a better CPA who can give your business better intelligence. This is because when you think filing a tax return for your business is just a tedious one time ordeal every year, your competitors' businesses are engaging their better qualified CPA to make the best out of all the information they turn in for their tax preparation, to help them formulate strategies to improve performance.

So before retaining someone to prepare your business tax return, ask yourself if you want a key-punching tax preparer, or you want a qualified CPA who can guide your business beyond the tax filing deadline and contribute to your business's future. To find out if your current accountant or CPA is good enough for your business, ask yourself the following:

1) Did my CPA or accountant ever contribute solid ideas to help me improve my business in any way?

2) Did my CPA or accountant ever make a consistent effort to excel in servicing my business?

3)Did my CPA or accountant ever help me identify errors or mistakes that my business made? Did he or she help me avoid repeating the mistakes?

4) Was my CPA or accountant an effective problem solver for my business's tax or financial issues?

5)Did my CPA or accountant make effort to meet my business's expectation of his/her service by periodically asking me for feedback ?

6)Did my CPA or accountant care a lot about my business's future success?

Now, when you accept someone's offer to do your business's tax return at a low charge, you know how much disfavor you can be doing to your business.

At Starr Judson & Co., LLP, we are more than our clients' tax preparer, we are their reliable business advisors.