Nobody ever comes to us saying, "I deliberately chose the cheapest accountant I could find." Because that’s just not how it happens.
Usually they've been recommended by someone they trust, they've had a decent conversation, the proposal lands in their inbox and the monthly fee seems reasonable. Job done.
But over the years I've noticed something. Businesses rarely change accountants because of what they're paying. They change because of what they're not getting. The fee is only part of the equation.
If an accountant is charging significantly less than the market, the maths has to work somehow. There aren't many ways of doing that. You either take on far more clients than you should, spend less time on each one, or strip the service back to the bare minimum. Most firms don't set out to do that. It's simply the commercial reality of running a business.
The result is an accountant who is constantly reacting rather than getting ahead of problems. The statutory accounts get filed. The VAT returns go in on time. Payroll gets processed. Questions get answered when they arrive.
Everything that's urgent gets done but everything that's important often doesn't.
The problem is that clients don't see what never happened.
Nobody sends you an email saying, "Good news, we spotted that tax issue six months ago before it became a £15,000 problem." Nobody invoices for preventing a cash flow crisis or points out that they quietly talked you out of making an expensive mistake. The biggest value an accountant provides is often invisible because it consists of problems that never materialise.
I've seen businesses save £100 a month in fees and lose tens of thousands because nobody challenged what they were doing. I've seen consultancy firms growing quickly but making less money because nobody had taken the time to work out whether their pricing actually made sense. I've seen directors wondering why they're always busy but never seem to have any cash, when the warning signs had been sitting in the numbers for months.
None of those businesses had bad accountants. They had busy accountants. There's a difference.
Compliance looks backwards. It tells you what happened. That's important, because somebody has to keep HMRC happy.
But if that's all you're getting, you've reduced your accountant to being a historian. A good accountant should be helping you make better decisions before they become historical facts.
They should notice when your margins start slipping. They should ask why turnover has increased but cash hasn't. They should tell you when your systems are beginning to creak, when your pricing no longer reflects the value you deliver, or when you're taking unnecessary tax risks.
Sometimes they'll even tell you things you don't particularly want to hear. This is where the value actually sits.
It's funny, really. Most business owners won't think twice about spending thousands on new equipment, software or marketing because they see those things as investments. Yet they'll spend weeks shopping around to save £50 or £100 a month on the one adviser who has visibility of almost every financial decision they make.
That's often a false economy.
Could you find someone cheaper than us? Of course you could. There will always be another accountant willing to do it for less.
The better question is this: what disappears from the service to make that lower fee possible?
Because that's the bit nobody compares. The cheapest accountant isn't always the one with the lowest monthly fee. Quite often, they're the one who ends up costing you the most. You just don’t see it.
