Accountamancy

In which our Hero finds that it’s easier to pass a camel through the eye of a needle than it is to find a good accountant

In just a few minutes, I’ll be slipping out of the office for my first meeting to engage with my new prospective accountant. And I’m deeply anxious. Which is silly, opines my financially savvy sweetheart Nocturne (who is in fact CPA – Certifiably Pretty Amazing), because record keeping is just not that complicated (which is true) and the accountant is there to help. So she asked me why I feel anxious.

I feel anxious because:

1) Accountants are not created equal. In fact, my previous accountant is a provable example of a completely professional individual who nevertheless completely failed to inspire confidence or customer satisfaction because he does not educate. The “new” firm I’m going to is actually a big job, with hundreds if not thousands of clients, all in my profession. They have experience and provide data and expertise. They run seminars. They’re also prone to severe customer service failures as evidenced by a colleague’s experience. Frankly I’d have been scared off except for the reports they provide.

As with Doctors or Lawyers, Accountants are members of a broadly variable profession that as an individual, I have no experience to be able to judge until after I’ve already made a commitment of some kind with them. How do you pick, how do you compare, except for word of mouth and crappiness of website?

And how do you evaluate the work?

2) Because what they are doing is helping you to create your financial reporting. Which is partly for you. And mostly for your governing taxation authority. Who are very keenly interested in what you have to say.

See, my view of taxes is that it’s art. It’s a game of making an arrangement of your finances to show in the most favourable light while obeying the current rules in effect. Except the rules are vague and nebulous. So either you ask for a ruling which is time consuming and result in a letter that still fails to say simply yes or no but rather describes an area of regulation or law and the multiple interpretations and governing circumstances leaving the final interpretation up to you. Unless they decide to do their own interpretation later which could be different.

Me, I play that game conservatively. I claim what I know I can claim, and I avoid the “fishy” situations because I don’t want the further attention of the lovely people at the revenue agency/service. (They are lovely, I genuinely like them, just for the record.) On the other hand, conservatism means that I’m leaving money on the table. And I want to be conservative without being stupid. But where’s the line between being stupid and being unconservative? And where’s unconservative relative to creative. And where’s creative relative to wrong?

So I look to my accountant for advice and experience. Which is why I’m spending more for the larger firm, so that I can get that benefit of experience with what is allowed, disallowed, and what they’re advocating as a position to create or maintain a precedent or convention. But see that last thing, that’s also a interpretation thing. I’m hoping my accountant is also conservative. And if they say enough right words, I’ll believe they are. But then when they say, “All my clients do X” and I disagree about doing X…. am I being stupid by disregarding the advice of my paid and experienced professional, or am I being conservative and cautious and smart?

If I disagree with my doctor, I can google symptoms and side effects and at least formulate an educated opinion. It will not have the benefit of years of training or the expertise to prioritize facts and conditions to tell which pieces of information are critically important. But I will still have a general sense of “yes, my foot hurts and this doctor person seems to be talking about footy sorts of things, jolly good, jolly good, old chap! Pip pip, cheerio, kaboodle.”

But if I disagree with my accountant, I’m flying blind. I can argue the math, because the math is real, from the street, you know? Po po gon’ pop a negative sign all up in dat. But after the raw math, it’s… dance. Buddy gotta deduct the EI premiums and CPP, unless it’s all an advance against expenses, represent.

3) Because I don’t have a context. I don’t know the conventions, and I don’t know the best practices. Or even just the standard practices. What’s the best way to buy a car? Was I supposed to loan myself the money to buy myself the car? Or was I supposed to buy the car and then lease it back to myself? Or was I suppose to lease the car and then just drive it? Is it okay to loan my dad a million dollars? Do I have to have the million dollars first or can I work on that part after the loan?

I don’t know. I don’t know, and I don’t feel comfortable. I actually think there’s a bit of an opportunity there in that selling a cookie cutter service for starting up a business structured in geekspeak would be something that I’d have paid non-zero cashy money for back when I started, and frankly again now, as I wonder where the threshold for operating my offshore holding company would lie.

I hate the insecurity of it, and so working with this stuff depresses me, and the uncertainty doesn’t go away because there are still constant little variations and I don’t know what I don’t know.

After the fact, I’d say that the appointment was successful. I have engaged the accountant, my contact did in fact say “footy” sorts of things when I complained of foot pains, and as embarrassing as it was to have to repeatedly answer “Why did you do it that way?” with “It was my best guess in the absence of guidance,” I did get her approval in a few spots where I’d done things in ways that fit their recommendations.

And for an added bonus, the quiet time on the subway got me through the last half of Dallandrah’s book.

Just to make this entry differently boring, I will record that Nocturne reported on an odd conversation on the weekend. I was taking a drug-induced nap while she worked on her starship designs, and during that interval, my parents were followed home by a toddling grandneice who has taken a shine to them. So as I dreamed, Nocturne said something about there being loud kids in the house.

And according to her, I offered to put out traps.

Now, if you’ve been reading me for any period of time, you know that I’m generally good with kids and mostly enjoy them. So I was flabbergasted to hear what my subconscious had been up to. But Nocturne says I said it. And that I should report on that.

So there.