Generally, we at Just Accountants have a great deal of sympathy for people who aren't happy with their current accountant and are looking to change.

If you aren't getting the service you feel you deserve, then, sure, it's time to find a new accountant.

However, there is one caveat to this. Regardless of anything else, qualified accountants are professional people with a level of expertise that you don't possess.

It is this expertise and experience that you are paying for as a UK business. And, like it or not, expertise does cost money. You may think that you're not getting value for money because it appears that your chartered accountants aren't spending hours and hours on your accounts. But you aren't paying them for their time....you're paying for an expertise that you don't possess.

So, if you are looking for an accountant in London or Bolton or wherever, take a moment to reflect before you switch. It may not be to your benefit.

Accountancy Age seem a little surprised at the low numbers of accountants in the UK who have blogs - suggesting that the number is barely in the double figures.

Quite why the surprise, I don't know. Many UK accountants haven't even got their own domain names or proper websites yet - so having large numbers blogging is a long way off, methinks.

Accountants and other 'professionals' such as solicitors and teachers who are looking for a 100% mortgage will no longer find any joy with Scottish Widows.

The company has dropped their 100% mortgage offer for professionals in favour of a 5% deposit.

While the company itself is claiming that it is "the market" that has forced the change, this does call into question the creditworthiness of accountants and other professionals.

My view is that the professional classes should not ever receive special treatment and that all applications should be viewed on a individual basis. What's so controversial about that?

While I was checking out the rankings of our website in Google, I ran across a couple of pretty funny accountancy quotes, which I thought I'd share with you.

“I have no use for bodyguards, but I have very specific use for two highly trained certified public accountants.”
Elvis Presley

“An accountant is a man who watches the battle from the safety of the hills and then comes down to bayonet the wounded”
Unknown

“A statistician is someone who is good with numbers, but lacks the personality to be an accountant”
Unknown

Well, I thought they were funny. On similar lines, I'm collecting a few anecdotes from some of the accountants we work with and will put the best on this blog.

It looks like attempts to cut down the amount of binge and teenage drinking in the UK might backfire as major off license chains and supermarkets are putting pressure on brewers to absorb the recent alcohol tax rises.

Bargain Booze are quoted in the story as having sent a letter to suppliers, saying:

"...We will have to review the position of any brands where the retail ticket is increased in our business ... We regret to say that we cannot absorb the increases in costs that the Budget would seem to demand.' It asks suppliers to help 'by absorbing these increases within your own company'..."

My own view is that the price of alcohol in the UK has little or nothing to do with a 'binge-drinking' culture, if there even is such a thing.

Alcohol in the UK is far, far more expensive than in continental Europe and if the government are insistent on trying to legislate our lifestyles, they are going to have to find more effective ways to do it.

I'm feeling obliged to post something about the budget.

There are far, far more qualified people than me to comment on the implications of this particular budget, but the overall tone of response is far from positive.

The Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph describes it as the dullest in history, while The Times concurs, suggesting that it will also be unpopular.

For some more in depth analysis of the possible consequences, Bloomberg feel that the combination of no tax rises plus increased borrowing will squeeze UK businesses while The Financial Times questions whether the Chancellor's economic forecasts are accurate.

My own view is that this is an extremely cautious budget that attempts to just weather an oncoming economic storm without really providing the tools necessary to do so. Taxing drinkers and petrol is hardly the way to do it, is it?

For some reason, this article predicting an 'Enron style scandal' in the UK seems to be generating a lot of interest at the moment.

The essence of it is that, according to a survey commissioned by a document management company, "89 per cent [of senior IT professionals] claimed that someone at their company had the capability to tamper with or lose documents to suit their own ends."

This, apparently, has the potential to lead to an Enron-style accounting scandal.

Quite why the fact that employees are not always utterly honest and could commit crimes is such a story, I don't know. But I do commend document management software company Version One, who commissioned the research, for getting their press release such wide coverage. Much respect.

Since Germany bought stolen banking records and started investigating the Liechtenstein banking network for tax fraud, there have been increasing calls within the EU to end tax havens.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel told a joint press conference with French President Nicolas Sarkozy that "We will support the French presidency's aims of tackling tax havens and states operating privileged tax systems with the aim of achieving harmonized taxation" only yesterday.

However, although it may seem like the big European nations are trying to control the banking set-ups of their smaller partners, there simply isn't the legal framework to force countries like Liechtenstein, Switzerland and Monaco to hand over the names of clients to foreign governments without the individual's consent.

This alone should ensure that tax havens remain existent, not to mention that too deep a probe may reveal things other EU countries (mentioning no names) would prefer to remain hidden.

At Just Accountants, every day we talk to small and medium sized businesses who are looking for a new accountant.

We thought it would be interesting to record the reasons they were considering changing their accountants - mainly for our own internal use.

We had, rather unimaginatively, expected price to be the main issue. But it isn't.

We found that over 72% of SMEs who wanted to change their accountant did so because their accountants just didn't provide a responsive service. We got stories about emails being ignored for weeks and phone calls not being returned at all.

Personally, I think this is pretty shocking (we spoke to 600 SMEs in all). It shows that some accountants are either supremely arrogant in their dealings with clients or - and this is a far more charitable view - simply have too many clients.

Either way, it simply isn't acceptable. Luckily there are some great, responsive, client orientated accountants out there and we wish them all the best.

There will be a press release about this going out tomorrow and we're considering publishing the rest of the data on this blog.

Coming to a screen near you....Arnold Schwarzenegger is...The Accountant.

Take a look at this very funny movie parody, starring everyone' s favourite Governator as an accountant :

A recent report commissioned by the people at BACS indicates there is 18.6billion pounds in late payments owed to the UK's SMEs.

Even if these numbers are inflated, this represents a shocking amount of debt. It's no wonder that it is so difficult to get a business established in this country.

The main problem with late payments is that there is a knock-on effect. IE: Business C is owed £2,000 by Business B and therefore can't pay the £1,000 owed to Business A.

The problem is unless you only take payments for all services upfront, this is going to be a continuing problem.

My own experiences suggest that UK businesses are particularly slow payers. I dealt solely with American businesses for several years (although I was and am UK based) and they tended to pay on time every time. This despite the fact that it would be easier for a US based business to stiff me altogether.

One of the most interesting things about the survey was this :

"SMEs in the North East are the least likely to experience problems (42 per cent against the national average). North West SMEs have the best results when it comes to overdue invoices. They spend just 12 days chasing guilty suppliers and 45 per cent said they experienced late payments from time to time."

Greater London, somewhat unsurprisingly, had the most problem with overdue invoices.

I would be interested in hearing people's solutions to this problem because, to be honest, I don't have many bright ideas.

I think that toughening up laws surrounding late payments and allowing businesses to charge extremely high interest rates on late invoices might help, but further than that, I'd be interested in hearing ideas.

Over at franchising website, Making Money, there's an article that suggests that "Half of the UK’s small businesses waste more than 24 working days a year on non-core business activity such as finance, IT and human resources..."

While it is clearly true that small business owners do spend a lot of time dealing with administrative tasks, I take issue with the use of the word "waste".

Finance and human resources are essential activities and to suggest that time spent on them is wasted is simply wrong.