Regardless of the size of your small business, if you use an accountant for financial recordkeeping and tax return preparation, make sure the paperwork you hand over is complete and orderly. Find out how your accountant prefers to receive your material and comply with that format. Not only is this good business practice, but you’ll save money if your accountant isn’t spending billable time hunting down documents and imposing order on chaos.
During my years in public practice, I dealt with numerous clients whose accounting and auditing bills were far higher than they needed to be, simply because they were, quite frankly, paperwork slobs. The aversion to administrative and accounting matters that so many small-business owners share is understandable — but it’s no excuse. I learned this lesson early in my career.
It’s said that you never forget your first time for anything. I’ve certainly never forgotten my first accounting client. One day, the partner to whom I was articled announced that he was going to introduce me to my very first client of my own. For a first-year articled clerk, this was a genuine milestone.
My excitement faded the moment we pulled up to the store. If you’ve ever pictured a five-year-old expecting a puppy for his birthday and unwrapping a hamster instead, you’ll have some idea of how I felt.
The partner pushed open a heavy blue wood-framed glass door with a well-worn brass doorknob. A jingling bell announced our arrival. It was a small confectionery shop straight out of a Dickens novel. Ceiling-high wooden shelving units lined the bare plank floor, crammed with loaves of bread and bags of buns. An assortment of small items filled the glass-fronted counter that nearly bisected the cramped space, leaving room for only four or five customers at a time. From the ceiling hung a previously coiled length of sticky brown flypaper, almost entirely covered in its victims.
“Michael will be doing your books and tax return for last year,” said the partner, introducing me to Mrs. Taljaard.
“Okay,” she said. “The stuff is all in the box in the office.” She gestured toward the doorway behind and to the right of the counter. “Just please move Caesar.”
On the desk in the tiny, dingy, windowless office sat a cardboard box of accounting documents for the past year. Comfortably curled up in a deep sleep on top of the documents was a ginger tabby cat.
“Sorry, Caesar,” said the partner, lifting the cat out of the box and setting him down beside it on the desk. If you can imagine being lifted out of your bed in the middle of the night and left standing beside it — unsteady, disoriented, and groggy — you’ll have a fair picture of what Caesar looked like as we left with his bed and my first accounting assignment.
Back at the office, I set the cardboard box down next to my desk, and a mushroom cloud of cat hair billowed up as it hit the floor. Beyond the abundant evidence of Caesar’s shedding, the box contained a year’s worth of unopened bank statements and a jumble of business documents, all dropped in at random. What should have been a straightforward annual accounting job for a very small business had become a forensic exercise — made worse by the fact that many of Mrs. Taljaard’s bakery delivery documents were printed on NCR paper. NCR paper is chemically treated to produce copies without carbon paper, and Caesar, it turned out, had a taste for it. Many of these documents had been chewed so badly they were worthless as accounting vouchers.
Mrs. Taljaard and Caesar unwittingly added to my accounting education by demonstrating that being a paperwork slob can drive up your annual accounting fees exponentially. A little care in sorting and organizing your paperwork will not only save you hours of frustration hunting for documents — it will save you considerably in accounting fees as well. More than enough, certainly, to buy a cat a proper bed.
