Written by John Spencer | 05 February 2011

Accountants are getting a fair bit of pressure to reduce fees from clients who are themselves looking for areas to ‘cut corners’.

Fair enough – all costs are there to be controlled. Any accountant would advise that. At Connor Spencer we believe we have always been good value for money and continue to be and we do try to accommodate our clients’ needs and wishes.

But it is worth considering what the competition offers that firms such as ourselves are up against.

Firstly, there are many accountants and tax ‘outlets’ that process your data cheaply mainly because they do not think beyond what you present them. They insist on data being submitted to them in a prescribed form and if the data is badly presented it is just processed as given with all the consequences with the Revenue that can entail.

At Connor Spencer we support our clients, and we work with them. We take in the information from clients in a form that suits them, not us – part of our skill is to be adaptable – and we take care to examine it as well as process it. If something looks wrong, we question it. We advise on what is presented – and on what is NOT presented. We know our clients, and we know the many industry and commerce sectors our client work in, and if you are not telling us of costs we would expect to find we will check with you if they have been overlooked.

Secondly, think of us as a form of insurance. Because of the care we take we have a very low incidence of Revenue investigations. While the Revenue aspires to 10% of all taxpayers being examined annually, we have around 2 or 3 such cases per year out of our approx 750 clients – that’s 0.003%.

You pay insurance in many areas of life and you get ‘nothing’ at all for it except peace of mind (not to be understated!). Part of the fees you pay a firm such as ours relates to that "insurance" and the peace of mind we offer is not to be understated either.  You would give up many of your insurances very reluctantly – don’t give up this one too easily either.

Thirdly, when the going gets rough we are there to assist you and support you through those times. We have almost 30 years of experience in dealing with the Revenue and even at low numbers of investigations that it a lot of experience. We also have a dedicated tax specialist in our offices who examines all the work in such cases.

And we offer fee protection insurance so that should the Revenue pick on you, our fees are covered by the insurance which takes a load off of you and allows us the freedom to work as deeply and hard as you need us to on your behalf.

John Ruskin – a stunningly bright social thinker, the Stephen Fry of his day - at the end of the 19^th century said: “It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money -- that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot -- it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better.”