How to Find and Choose the Right Accountant for Your Company

Accountants act as the stewards of an organisation’s cash flow. Along with their finance chief, they work to preserve a company’s financial health — all while ensuring compliance with relevant accounting standards and government regulations. Thus, you must set proper criteria on how to choose an accountant for your company’s accounting department.  

Here are the things you must keep in mind when finding, selecting, and hiring a professional accountant.

How to choose the right accountant

As a chief financial officer (CFO), you need all the help you can get to support your company’s financial goals. Your role involves leading the entire accounting department, or even an extension of it, in making sure that your organisation’s finances are in the green. 

To build a functional accounting team, each person who forms it must also be the right fit — someone with the qualifications, expertise, and skills for a certain role. 

So how do you find and choose a good accountant?

Before you start your recruitment process, identify the following details first: 

1. List down tasks

Begin with the list of tasks needed for the job. Doing so will help you identify if the role involves basic accounting tasks or more complex and technical responsibilities. From there, you can decide if you need to work with a specialist or if an entry-level role would suffice. 

2. Estimate the amount of workload over a specific duration

Estimate the amount of workload involved in each task. You may also want to look into your existing processes and software: 

Which tasks can be automated, and which one requires more attention and effort?  

Another thing is to check how often a task needs to be performed. Accounts reconciliation, invoicing, payroll, and order management — for instance — may require your accountant’s attention either on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. 

By knowing these details, you can decide if you need to hire a full-time, part-time, or project-based role. 

3. Know your budget

An accountant’s paycheck may differ depending on their years of experience, specialisation, certifications, skills, and even location. If you know your budget, it’ll be easier to identify more options for finding accountants with reasonable salary expectations.  

In the United Kingdom, for example, accountants have a monthly average salary of £2,575. If this sounds too competitive, hiring accountants from other locations with lower market rates but excellent talent quality can be more feasible. 

4. Decide if you should hire in-house or outsource

It's already a normal concept to work with accountants remotely. We have all the means to make it happen — cloud accounting, business intelligence, data analytics tools, and project management platforms, to name a few. This gives you the choice to either hire in-house or outsource to a specialised accounting service provider. 

Both options have their pros and cons in terms of team management, cost, and ease of communication. Before you decide, make sure to weigh up which of the two is more beneficial for your company. 

The items above set the stage for your recruitment team to find talents who meet your criteria. For the next steps, let’s figure out where you can find competent professionals and how you can attract them to work with your organisation, especially amid the ongoing talent shortage in the accounting industry.  

5. Advertise your job ads on the right platforms

Always see to it that your job ads have enough visibility. Job sites like Indeed, Glassdoor, and Reed are good places to start — but you can also maximise your company’s social accounts such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.  

6. Ask for referrals

You can also tap into your network to ask for personal recommendations. 

At D&V Philippines, for instance, we ask our employees for referrals and reward them with every successful hire.

It's one of our most effective recruitment strategies. After all, our accountants know more accountants than we do, be it from their university, organisations, or previous jobs. 

Attending job fairs and checking the list of professional accounting bodies are also good options, though doing so may require significant use of your resources. 

Once you have a pool of qualified accounting talents, your next challenge is to choose who among them is the most suitable candidate. Sort through your applicants by considering the following factors: 

7. Ask about their certification

One of the first things to look at is whether the accountant you’re working with has the right qualifications, such as being a licensed CPA. These professionals are usually required to keep up with current tax laws and are more knowledgeable when it comes to coordinating with tax agencies and preparing financial statements for different uses. 

If the firm you’re working with outsources to a third-party company, you may need to ask them to be upfront about it. Outsourcing some of the work is not an entirely uncommon practise for accounting firms, so make sure you’re coordinating with the right professional when it comes to getting first-hand or second-hand advice regarding your financials. 

8. Check their professional qualifications

You can also gauge an applicant through their accreditations.   

Choosing an accountant registered with reputable accounting bodies assures you of their knowledge, work experience, and ethics.  

At the same time, it also gives you a degree of protection in case they fail to perform their duties since they’re required to have Professional Indemnity Insurance.  

In the United Kingdom, the accounting bodies you must look out for include: 

• Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) 
• Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) 
• Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) 
• Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland (ICAS) 
• Chartered Institute of Taxation (CIOT) 

9. Ask applicants about their experience and specialisation

By far, the best accountant you could get depends on how much they know about your business’s industry.  

Certain kinds of corporate taxes in the UK have specific rules per type of business, so it’ll be up to a professional’s experience to know how to manoeuvre around these regulatory updates (including how your small business’s income or employee wages are reported). 

10. Assess their client relations and customer service

Do they have the same approach to managing your business finances? Would you trust them if they recommended a more aggressive or conservative approach to writing off taxes

At the end of the day, it is still an accountant’s individual financial philosophies that will keep your business trusting in their advice, rather than just experience or competence. 

Read Next: Your Comprehensive Guide to Outsourcing in Offshore Locations 

Expand the capacity of your accounting department

Regardless of what phase your company is in, propping your operations with a dedicated team of accountants spares you from any financial distress that may come. Outsourcing accounting functions to a reliable team gives you access to professional expertise outside your range and marshals necessary accounting resources to introduce efficiency to the process.  

Their financial insights are among the facets that shed light on how you can strategically maximise any opportunities you encounter. And with these details taken care of in the background, you can focus more on running the core operations.  

You know how to find a good accountant in the UK when they make your business their business too. Working with these professionals for the long haul ensures your F&A processes transition to an easier approach for your business.

If you plan to outsource some of your accounting functions, D&V Philippines is ready to support your needs. Contact us today to see if we’re a good fit. You can also download our whitepaper, Finance and Accounting Solutions for UK CFOs, to learn more about our services.

This post was first published on 11 May 2015 and has been updated since then for relevancy. 

Last update: 04 June 2024 

Edited and updated by: Mary Milorrie M. Campos