Choosing and Switching Accounting Firms: The Questions Owners Ask Most

Ask three things that are hard to answer without a real process: who signs as the licensed bookkeeper for your company, what is delivered each month and on which date, and who attends with you if the Revenue Department sends a summons. Answers that name a person and a date are worth more than a broad description of scope.

It usually means a narrower scope than assumed: keying whatever is sent, without checking that documents are complete, without a bank reconciliation, and without year-end closing or replies to official letters. Ask for the deliverables as a numbered list and compare them side by side; the price explains itself once scopes sit on one page.

The bookkeeper for a juristic person must be registered and meet the statutory qualifications, while the auditor who signs the financial statements is a separate person who must be independent of the bookkeeper. Ask for both names and registration numbers at the start and check them yourself against the regulator's database.

A small firm usually gives you the same person throughout, with fast replies, but exposure if that person is away or leaves. A larger firm has cover and layered review, but your contact may change and requests move through a queue. The safer test is whether work is documented in a system, not how big the office is.

Ask for a redacted sample of one month's reporting pack. It should contain a trial balance, receivable and payable detail, and a summary of the returns filed that month. If only a cover page can be shown, the real deliverable may be a single summary file rather than something you can make decisions from.

At minimum: the monthly and annual deliverables, the date you must submit documents and the date the firm must return the work, who bears surcharges when a late filing is caused by which side, the terms for returning your records on termination, and which contact channel counts as official.

The fair rule is that the party who caused the delay pays. If documents arrive after the agreed written cut-off, the delay is yours; if they arrived on time and the filing still missed the deadline, the firm should carry it. Write this alongside the proof mechanism, such as email or an intake system that timestamps receipt.

Commonly billed separately: reconstructing periods before the engagement began, responding to audit correspondence, preparing packs for loan applications, refund claims, and registry amendment filings. Ask for those rates upfront even if you do not expect to need them.

State plainly where originals are held, in which system digital copies live, and whether you have standing access or must request it. The retention period for accounting records is set by law, and the party asked to produce them is the company, not the firm, so originals should not all sit outside the owner's reach.

In practice yes, but grant it at a limited and auditable level: separate user accounts for the staff who work on your file, never a shared director login, with a review of access whenever the responsible person changes or the engagement ends, so it stays visible who filed what and when.

Yes, and it is routine. What matters is the cut-off: fix the last month the outgoing firm is responsible for, close balances to that month-end, then hand a trial balance with supporting detail for each balance to the incoming firm. Nearly every troubled transition comes from a cut-off the two sides never agreed on.

Start with a written demand listing the items and a collection date, sent in a way that proves receipt. A company's accounting records belong to the company, not to the bookkeeper. If they are still withheld, keep every follow-up on file; that trail serves both the negotiation and any further step you may need.

Four checks before accepting: whether book balances agree to external evidence, whether returns already filed reconcile to the ledger, how much sits in unsupported balances, and whether any official letter remains unanswered. That review sets both the scope and the fee for the first phase.

The incoming firm is not liable for what happened before its engagement began, but it must tell the owner what it finds and propose how to correct it. The resulting tax exposure still belongs to the company as the taxpayer, which is why writing down who handled which period matters from day one.

The registered bookkeeper details for the juristic person must be kept current in the regulator's system, and the outgoing firm's access to your filing accounts should be revoked on the same day the new firm starts. Leaving both with access is a common cause of duplicate filings that are awkward to unwind.

Frequent signals: a cash-on-hand balance far above what the bank shows, a director loan account that grows every year without repayment, receivables aged for years and never written off, and inventory that has never been counted. Those four are the first places an examiner looks.

First establish where the balance came from: real withdrawals, or entries used to absorb an unexplained cash difference. If withdrawals are real, document a loan agreement, charge interest on the prescribed basis, and set a repayment plan. If it was a plug, fix the source and assess the tax effect for the years involved.

Run a physical count and record the result with the date and the people present as evidence. Then analyse the difference: damage, loss, sales without documents, or posting errors. Each cause has a different adjustment and a different tax effect. Writing the balance down without explaining why is what turns an audit into a larger problem.

As a rule, amending voluntarily before the error is found carries a lighter burden, since part of the penalty can be reduced under the conditions set out in the law. Still, assess first whether the difference is material and whether amending opens other points in the same year. Put both paths in numbers before deciding.

They need not change together, and keeping the same auditor sometimes makes year-on-year comparison smoother. What must be preserved is independence: the auditor cannot be the party keeping the books for the same company. If a provider offers both roles, ask precisely who signs which document.