Content ideas for accountants

Explain the difference between a deduction and a credit in plain terms.

Clients use these words interchangeably and they are not the same thing, which is why one of them disappoints people every year.

Answer whether a business owner should put a family member on payroll.

Third time this month someone has asked whether they can put their spouse on payroll. The answer depends on two things, and neither of them is the tax rate.

Explain why a refund is not a measure of whether the year went well.

A large refund is not a win. It means you lent money interest-free for a year, and it usually means the estimates were set against the wrong income.

Clarify what the home office question actually turns on.

Working from home and having a home office are two different claims, and the distinction is the whole question.

Explain what mileage and expense substantiation really requires in practice.

Everyone knows to keep receipts. Almost nobody keeps the part that matters, which is the record of why the expense existed.

Walk through the sequence you use before advising on entity structure.

Before we tell anyone whether to change entity structure, we look at four things in this order.

Show how you weigh a year-end equipment purchase against first-quarter cash flow.

A deduction that strains January cash flow is an expensive deduction, and January is when receipts are slowest.

Explain how the return is read by lenders and buyers, not just the tax authority.

Your return has more than one audience, and the other readers want the number to look different.

Describe what changes about the finance function when a business passes ten employees.

Around ten employees, the bookkeeping setup that worked for five quietly stops answering the questions the owner now needs answered.

Lay out the questions a business should be able to answer before approaching a lender.

Before a bank asks you anything, there are four questions your own numbers should already answer.

Publish a pre-season checklist of what clients should gather now.

The clients who have the easiest February are the ones doing twenty minutes of this in November.

Explain what a year-end planning conversation actually covers.

Year-end planning is not a phone call about deductions. Here is what an hour in December actually covers.

Set expectations for how your firm handles response times during the season.

Our response times get longer in February and March. That is deliberate, and here is the trade we are making.

Post the mid-year check-in nobody books.

June is the cheapest month to fix a tax problem and the month nobody calls about one.

Explain what to do in the week after the deadline, not before it.

The deadline has passed. The three things worth doing this week will make next year materially easier.

Explain what clean books and complete books actually mean.

Clean and complete are different standards, and the gap between them is where March disappears.

Describe the categorisation mistakes that cost the most time to unpick.

Owner draws recorded as expenses. A loan sitting in income. Twelve months of a category called Miscellaneous.

Explain the difference between profit and cash, using the month it hurts most.

Profitable businesses run out of cash constantly, and the month it usually happens is the one after the best quarter.

Cover what an owner should look at in their numbers monthly, not annually.

There are three numbers an owner should look at every month. Most look at one, once a year.

Explain contractor versus employee classification as a business risk, not a form.

Classification is not a paperwork question. It is a question about who controls the work, and the answer has a cost attached.

Describe a recurring situation where a client asked the right question too late.

A pattern we see every year: the structure question that gets asked in March about a decision made the previous June.

Write about the assumption business owners most often get wrong about their own numbers.

Most owners can tell you their revenue instantly and their margin not at all, which is the wrong way round.

Describe what usually goes wrong when a business grows faster than expected.

A strong year creates a problem the following spring, and almost nobody sees it coming in the strong year.

Explain the most common reason a set of books cannot answer a lender's question.

The books were built to file a return, not to explain a business, and a lender is asking the second question.

Take on the always maximise deductions advice circulating online.

The advice going around that you should always maximise deductions is roughly half right, and the missing half is expensive.

Address the idea that you can write anything off if you call it a business expense.

The word deductible is doing an enormous amount of work in the advice you saw online.

Explain why cheap filing software is fine right up until it is not.

Software handles a simple year well. The question is whether you can tell in advance that your year is simple.

Push back on the idea that an accountant is only needed once a year.

If your accountant only hears from you in March, you are paying for compliance and missing the part that pays for itself.

Explain what onboarding a new business client actually involves, week by week.

Here is what onboarding a new business client actually takes, week by week, including the part that depends on you.

Describe what you need from a client before work can start.

The four things we ask for before we can start, and why the second one holds up more engagements than the rest combined.

Introduce a team member by what they handle rather than their title.

If you have emailed us about payroll in the last year, you have been talking to Maria. Here is what she actually handles.

Explain how the firm decides whether it is the right fit for a prospective client.

We turn down work most months. Here is the conversation where we work out whether we are the right firm for someone.