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.