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.

As part of what we do at Just Accountants, we have to visit tens, sometimes hundreds, of accountants websites every week.

And the one thing I've noticed is that pretty much every accountancy website I visit says the same thing.

"We're not like most accountants...we're different"

The phrasing may change but the sentiment is always the same.

Luckily for most accountants, clients searching around for a new accountant won't be looking at anywhere near the number of websites that we do and so may not notice this same tired claim appearing over and over again.

My advice to accountants or their web copywriters is to take a good look around the web at other sites in your industry and make sure that your claims to be different aren't actually making you the same as all your competitors.

The irony is that the claims to be "different" are usually found in tandem with claims that this accountant will provide a high level of personalised business support to clients, rather than just filling in forms at the end of the year.

However, as often as not, these type of claims are just unsupportable. If you are a 4-5 person accounting firm with 300+ clients, there just isn't the time to provide this type of support.

It is doing accountants no favours to make these claims if they are unable to back them up.

Most people probably knew that the deadline for filing self-assessment tax returns online was extended by a day because the HMRC website went down.

Um. Didn't anyone predict that January 31st would be a super high traffic day and ensure the HMRC's servers could cope with the demand. It appears not.

The thing is that, in internet terms, the additional server load wasn't that great - sites like Google, Digg and FaceBook handle far, far higher volumes each and every day with no problems and they don't have the resources of a government department.

I was intrigued by Richard Murphy's comments, however.

Murphy said "It’s tax submission deadline day and HMRC’s web site can’t handle the traffic. Don’t blame HMRC I say - just get it done on time."

If the deadline is January 31st, then filing on January 31st is getting it done on time. Or is there something I've missed ?