Let me start with a confession. For years, I thought hiring an accountant was a bit like buying the extended warranty on a toaster. Sounds responsible, rarely pays off, and mostly benefits the person selling it.
Then I spent a few years working with businesses of all sizes, and I had to revise that view. Not completely, mind you. I’m still sceptical of anyone who sells a service by making you nervous about not having it. But the question deserves a better answer than a shrug.
So, do you actually need an accountant?
Here’s the thing: the honest answer depends on what your business looks like right now, not what you hope it will look like in five years.
If you’re a sole trader with one income stream, no staff, and a tidy set of receipts, you can probably get a long way with decent bookkeeping software and the ATO guidance that’s freely available. Plenty of people do. Nobody needs to pay for advice they won’t use.
But there’s a point where the maths flips. And it usually arrives quietly, disguised as something else.
It might be your first employee, which suddenly brings payroll, superannuation and a pile of obligations you didn’t have last month. It might be the day you register for GST and realise your BAS is no longer a once-a-year problem. It might be a second business, a property purchase, or an investment you’d like to structure sensibly instead of hopefully. Each of these is a small fork in the road, and the wrong turn tends to cost far more than the fee you were trying to avoid.
I’ve seen this pattern from the marketing side more often than you’d expect. A business owner spends months obsessing over ad spend, then leaves thousands on the table because nobody told them how a purchase should have been structured. The ads were optimised. The tax position wasn’t.
So what should you look for when you do decide to hire one?
Start with whether they actually understand businesses like yours. A firm that handles individual tax returns brilliantly may not be the right fit for a company with staff, stock and a growth plan. Ask how they communicate, too. If you need three emails and a prayer to get a straight answer, that’s your preview of the next five years.
Experience counts for more than polish. If you’re in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs, one of the longer-standing Blackburn accountants, RDL Accountants, has been operating for more than 60 years and has a team of over 35 specialists across tax, business services, audit, financial planning and superannuation. A firm that has seen several economic cycles tends to have already met whatever curveball your business is about to throw.
Local matters more than people admit, as well. Being able to sit across a table from someone who knows the area, the industries and the other businesses around you is a quiet advantage that no app replicates.
Finally, be wary of any accountant who only talks to you in June. Tax time is the least interesting part of the relationship. The real value is in the conversations you have well before the end of the financial year, when decisions can still change the outcome.
None of this means you need to rush out and sign someone up tomorrow. If your finances are simple, keep them simple. But if you’ve caught yourself googling tax questions at 11pm more than once this quarter, that’s probably your answer.
An accountant is not an extended warranty. Used well, it’s closer to a smoke alarm. You hope you never need it, but you’ll be very glad it’s there.
