Five Signs It’s Time to Find a New Accountant

Most business owners don’t look for a new accountant until something goes wrong. Sometimes it’s a single event. More often it’s a slow build-up of things that have quietly been going wrong for some time. Either way, by the time someone picks up the phone to us, there’s usually a clear pattern behind it. Here are the five things we hear most often.

1. No one responds or no one knows who you are

This is, without question, the most common reason business owners start looking. It rarely starts with a crisis. It starts with an email that takes a couple of weeks to get a reply. Or a phone call that goes to voicemail and isn’t returned. Then the realisation that every time you call the main number, you’re speaking to someone different.

My two pet hates: accountants that use a generic email address, so you are treated like an IT support ticket, and where you don’t have a direct phone number to a specific person. Not something that we do at Composure.

For an owner-managed business, your accountant is not a back-office function. You need to be able to ask a question and get a clear answer, in plain English, without having to chase. When that breaks down, when you don’t know who looks after you, or different parts of your service are handled by different people with no one coordinating the whole, the relationship stops working.

At Composure, every client has a named contact. That person knows your business, your structure, and your circumstances. They will also look after anyone connected to you like your business partner and your family. You know who to call, and they know who you are.

2. Filing is always last-minute and your tax bill is always a surprise

Your accountant’s job is not just to file. It is to keep you informed so that you can plan. If you regularly find out what your tax liability is only weeks before it is due, that is not good practice. It means you are not receiving the information in good time, and it puts you in a position where you have very little time to manage your cash flow around a payment you should have been able to prepare for.

Late filing compounds this. HMRC currently charges a £100 penalty for a Corporation Tax return filed even one day late, with further penalties escalating to 10% of the tax due for returns that remain outstanding beyond six months. From 1 April 2026, these fixed penalties are increasing, and Companies House penalties for late annual accounts can reach £1,500 for private companies, doubling for repeat offenders. None of these are recoverable or tax-deductible.

Beyond the financial cost, repeated late filing is a sign of a practice under pressure. Specifically, one without the processes in place to manage its workload and meet its clients’ deadlines. We aim to have accounts prepared well in advance of filing deadlines, with clients given early sight of their likely tax position so that there are no last-minute surprises.

3. You are the one who found the mistake

Mistakes happen. Human beings are not infallible (neither are machines for that matter). Tax legislation is complex, businesses are complex, and no practice is perfect. What matters is how errors are identified and handled. A good practice has the work and review processes in place to catch mistakes before they leave the office, and a no-blame culture that means that, if something does go wrong, it is acknowledged and corrected promptly. Accountability is paramount.

What should not happen is that you, the client, is the one who spots the problem. If you have to point out a mistake, that is a serious failure of process. It means work is leaving the practice without adequate review, and it means you are being asked to trust a service that has already let you down without realising it.

The causes are usually systemic: insufficient qualified staff, no formal review process, or a volume of clients that the practice cannot adequately service. We keep our client numbers manageable, our team qualified, and our processes structured so that work is reviewed before it reaches you.

It costs money to do things properly so please bear this is mind when you’re comparing fees.

4. Errors that should never have been made

Closely related to the above, but worth separating: some mistakes are not one-off oversights. They are the result of an accountant without the appropriate knowledge or qualification for the work they are taking on. Owner-managed limited companies have specific tax considerations – around remuneration, dividends, benefit-in-kind reporting, and director’s loans, for example, that require a practice to be up to date on current legislation and comfortable applying it correctly.

A practice that is growing too quickly, or that relies on insufficiently supervised junior staff, can produce work that is technically wrong in ways the client would have no reason to question. This is one of the most difficult situations to identify from the outside, which is why switching accountants often requires a thorough review of what has been filed on your behalf.

If you come to us from another accountant, we carry out a free health check. If we find something that we think is incorrect, we will tell you what needs to be done to put it right.

5. An HMRC enquiry

HMRC has significantly increased its compliance activity in recent years. Its 2024/25 Annual Report confirmed compliance yield at record levels, with 316,000 compliance checks conducted across all taxpayer types in that year alone. The government has committed to recruiting 5,000 additional compliance officers, and with the tax gap currently estimated at £46.8 billion, that investment in enforcement is set to continue.

An HMRC compliance check is not necessarily a sign that you have done anything wrong. Checks can be risk-based, random, or triggered by third-party data. What matters is that you have someone who knows how to respond: who understands the process, can represent you effectively, and who has the documentation in order.

Many accountants offer fee protection insurance, but it is typically arranged on a named-client basis meaning each individual client opts in. If your accountant has not raised this with you, or if you declined it at the time without fully understanding what it covered, you may find yourself facing an enquiry with no cover for the cost of dealing with it. We hold an all-client fee protection policy, which means every client we act for is covered as standard. You do not need to remember to opt in, and you do not find out the hard way that you should have.

If any of this sounds familiar, please come and have a no-pressure conversation. Switching accountants is simpler than most people expect. We will guide you through what you need to do and when, and we handle the process of transferring your records and notifying HMRC on your behalf.