How to prepare for your accountant (and pay them less)

An accountant's fee is mostly a function of how much sorting they have to do before they can start. Hand over a clean pack and you buy advice. Hand over a folder of screenshots and a shoebox and you buy data entry at professional rates.

What they actually need

• An income list. Every invoice, with number, date issued, date paid, client, amount, and currency. Not the PDFs, a list. They will ask for individual documents only if something needs checking.
• An expense list, categorised, with the receipts available in the same order.
• Bank statements for every account the business touched, for the full period.
• Opening and closing balances for those accounts.
• Asset purchases with dates and amounts, flagged separately from ordinary expenses.
• Loan or finance agreements, if any.
• Sales tax records, if registered.
• Last year's return and anything received from the tax authority since.
• A note of anything unusual, written by you, in plain language.

That last item is the one that saves the most time. Three lines explaining the odd 6,000 transfer in March prevents an hour of investigation and an email exchange.

Format matters more than completeness

A complete pack in an unusable format is still expensive. What works:

• CSV or spreadsheet for the income and expense lists, one row per transaction, consistent columns.
• PDFs named predictably, ideally date and vendor, in folders by month or category.
• One archive, delivered once. Six emails with attachments over three weeks is how things get missed.
• Consistent categories that match last year's, so year on year comparison works without remapping.

Most tools that hold your invoices and receipts can export exactly this. If yours can, use it rather than rebuilding by hand, because the export is also internally consistent in a way a manual list will not be.

Questions worth asking while you have their attention

You are paying for expertise, so use some of it:

• Am I on the right basis, cash or accrual, for my situation?
• Should I be changing entity structure at my current income level?
• What is my actual effective rate, so I can set my tax percentage correctly?
• Which deductions am I under claiming?
• What should I be doing differently through the year to make next year cheaper?
• Are there registration thresholds I am approaching?

Write these down before the meeting. The most common regret is realising afterwards that you had them on a call and only talked about last year.

The habits that make next year cheaper

• Capture receipts at the moment of purchase, not at year end.
• Keep business spending on one card and one account.
• Categorise as you go, using the same categories your accountant uses.
• Reconcile monthly so errors are caught while they are still explainable.
• Note anything unusual at the time, in one running document.

What to expect it to cost

Fees vary wildly by country and complexity, but the pattern is consistent everywhere: a clean, exported pack from a freelancer with separated accounts costs a fraction of what an untangling job costs. If your fee has risen year on year without your business becoming more complex, ask what is taking the time. The answer is usually something you can fix in an afternoon.

TL;DR

• Hand over lists, not documents: income and categorised expenses as spreadsheets, receipts available alongside.
• Deliver once, in one archive, with consistent categories and a short note explaining anything unusual.
• Use the meeting to ask about basis, structure, effective rate, missed deductions, and thresholds.
• Capture and categorise through the year. That is what makes the fee small.