The 15 October extended deadline for individual returns has passed, which means your accountant has something they do not have in February: 20 minutes and a working memory of your file. This is the best window of the year to ask them about your books, and almost nobody uses it.
Four questions are worth the call. None of them are tax questions, and we are not the people to ask tax questions of anyway.
How much of your invoice was bookkeeping?
Ask them to separate the return preparation from the work they did getting the records to a state they could prepare from. Most accountants will tell you straight, and the figure is often a third or more of the total. That number is the real cost of books that arrive unfinished, and it is being billed at tax preparation rates rather than bookkeeping rates.
What did you have to fix or guess at?
The specific answer matters more than the category. Reclassified transactions, a reconciliation that did not tie, an owner draw that was recorded as an expense, a fixed asset that was expensed. Write down what they say. That list is a map of what will go wrong again this year unless something changes about how the books are kept.
What would you want to see by February?
Accountants have a clear picture of the handoff they wish they got and are rarely asked to describe it. Their answer is usually a short list: reconciled accounts, a clean balance sheet, payroll that agrees with the filings, and the supporting detail for anything unusual. That list is the specification, and it is worth having in writing from the person who will actually use it.
Who should be doing the monthly work?
Ask directly whether they think your current arrangement is working. Accountants see the output every year and tend to have an opinion they have been too polite to volunteer. Some will offer to do the bookkeeping themselves, which is a legitimate option. Many prefer not to, because the work has a different rhythm than tax work and gets squeezed every spring.
Then act on it in October rather than filing the answers away. The 1 December cutoff for filing-ready books by 15 February is eight weeks after this conversation, which sounds like plenty and is not, once the holidays take two of them.
If the answers point at a gap, a 20-minute call with us is the next step. We do not prepare returns and have no interest in replacing your accountant. We hold the part that was never theirs to carry.
