Articles

Work needs to be done to improve the perception of accountants, says John Haylock.

“I know a really interesting accountant… yeah right.”

Those words appeared last year as part of the famous Tui beer campaign on billboards all over New Zealand. Sadly,those words also prove the stereotypical perception of the dull accountant is alive and well in New Zealand.

This is a major issue for the profession. How many bright, young people considering accountancy as a career will have driven past these billboards, read the message, and decided to do something else?

Over the years there has been rebranding of the profession by the Institute and by individual firms. Many accountants have attended boot camps and other events to re-programme their attitudes, encourage them to be more client-focused and provide new higher value services. New products have been developed and implemented to enable accountants to provide quicker, more timely and more accurate services.

Has this really made a difference? On the level of some individual firms it clearly has. There are brilliant accountancy firms in New Zealand. They provide a very high level of service, are wonderful places to work and make plenty of money for the owners.

But for every one of those firms there is another that fits the stereotype. In those firms nothing much has changed over the past 20 years.

Recently I re-read results of research by Massey University’s Dr Alan Cameron. He surveyed small business owners, accountants and related third parties such as bankers. His goals were to find out:

• What is the role of professional accountants in relation to small business clients?
• What services do accountants provide?
• What is the perceived quality of these services?
• What factors prevent accountants from meeting the needs of small business more effectively?

Cameron found that the main role expected of accountants was to supply compliance services but they were also expected to be concerned with the financial health of the clients’ business and to act as general business advisers.

In respect of compliance services, expectations were in line with actual performance. In relation to business advisory services and concern for financial health, client expectations were higher than perceived levels of performance.

As business advisers, accountants’ strengths were their ability to provide an objective viewpoint and their wide experience of small business problems.

Their main weaknesses were their lack of time to give in-depth advice and their remoteness from clients. Accountants were not perceived as actively seeking out client problems –although this was expected of them.

Small businesses and third parties believed accountants’ fees were unreasonable whereas accountants took the opposite view. Despite this compliance services were viewed as high quality and cost beneficial.

Accountants were perceived, even by themselves, as lacking communication skills when dealing with small business clients. In particular there were problems with accountants’ use of “language incomprehensible to clients and their reluctance to visit clients at their own premises”.

Third parties took the least favourable view of accountants’ performance – while accountants took the most favourable view of their performance.

In summary Cameron concluded that “accountants’ compliance services are regarded highly, but their business advisory services are not perceived to reach the same level”.

Cameron’s research was carried out in 1991 and published in the November 1992 issue of the Journal. I suspect that if the research was replicated in 2009 it would produce very similar results.

Change has definitely occurred but there has been no revolution in how accountants interact with clients. Overall it has been modest change. The comments I hear from business owners are that many accountants still focus on compliance, are still too busy, still use too many big words and are still perceived as not providing value for money.

While so many accountants continue to operate in that traditional way, it is no surprise that Tui can capture the popular perception in just a few words.

Yet, tools and processes exist to address all these common frustrations.

The best firms have these issues under control. There is great opportunity for other accountants to do the same and for the profession to truly capture the imagination of New Zealand’s business community.

John Haylock is Practice Performance Manager at BankLink. john.haylock@banklink.co.nz