Bob Gauvreau explains what accountants actually do beyond tax filing: bookkeeping, budgeting, financial analysis, and planning. His firm has an in-house law practice for tax and legal work. He says the best accountants coach you toward your financial goals, not just file paperwork.
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What to expect when you work with an accountant? Well, it really depends on the accountant. But what I will say is that accountants are much more than just tax filings. There's so much value, so much knowledge, experience, and education that's backing accountants. And truthfully, it kind of frustrates me when accountants pigeonhole themselves in a box to just file taxes. Although if you are getting your taxes filed, you should definitely rely on somebody with that sort of level expertise, education, and experience. But with working with an accountant, what you should expect is someone who's very knowledgeable in the business, finances, or the direction of finances inside an organization. How can they help support you? Well, for our team, for example, we can help support you with bookkeeping. Bookkeeping is essentially managing the ongoing transactions inside a business so that you have full transparency over what's happening inside your business. So you have a scoreboard of knowing exactly what's going on. Now, an accountant not only can help you get that scoreboard, but can help you interpret what that scoreboard means. Right. I think of financial information somewhat as the matrix. If anybody watched the matrix, you've got this code that's coming down the screen and nobody really understands it, except if you're in the matrix, you can read it. It's telling a story. And ultimately, I look at accountants to help read and tell that story. So we can help. As far as an accountant perspective, we can help pull that information together. But beyond that, it's the advice. How can we help plan out what the future looks like? We can create budgets, forecasts. We can help do analysis on buying or selling a business. We can help with estate and wealth planning from a conceptual standpoint of how we can mitigate sort of any tax exposure and build your wealth as quickly as possible. And for our team, obviously, we do bookkeeping, we do tax, we do accounting. We also have a law firm. So one of the things that we do is essentially the tax element of. Of legal transactions. So we do both sides of it. Because we have a law firm in house. Your accountant should be able to work with your legal professionals to help support you in any acquisition, such as a home, understanding the structure that you should have to optimize your tax position. But one thing that accountants can do not always do, they do. We may be a little bit unique in this, but is help coach you on how to be successful in your business, so how to drive your numbers from where they are now to achieving your goals. So what should you expect with an accountant? Ultimately, you should expect that someone has that education and that knowledge, how willing they are to continue to push you to the highest potential that you have available and is dependent upon the accountant. But if I'm looking for an accountant, I'm going to look for one where I can get access to all of those services.
