How many accountants does it take

They have strong internal controls. Why do accountants get excited at the weekends? Because they can wear casual clothes to work. Did you hear about the deviant Forensic Accountant?

How can you tell when the chief accountant is getting soft? When he actually listens to marketing before saying no. An accountant is having a hard time sleeping and goes to see his doctor.

Ever wonder why they call it a Form ? Why did the auditor cross the road? A farmer sends his accounting sheepdog, Spot, off to gather in his 8 sheep.

On returning the farmer is astonished to find he now has 10 animals in his pen and asks the dog to explain. He gets a faster calculator.

View Larger Image. Two things in life are inevitable: death and taxes. At least death only happens once. Accountancy Joke 8 Q: What does an accountant use for birth control? A: His personality. Accountancy Joke 9 Q: Did you hear about the constipated accountant? A: He worked it out with a pencil. Accountancy Joke 10 Q: What's the difference between an accountant and a lawyer? A: The accountant knows he is boring. Accountancy Joke 11 Q: How many accountants does it take to change a light bulb?

A: How many did it take last year? According to Accountancy Live the size of the US profession is driven by issues such as. Although Germany and Japan has larger economies than the UK they have less accountants. Apparently the UK accountants are better able to wrestle work away from lawyers, engineers or specialist tax advisers.

But many others have responded to trends within their industry by giving new meaning to specialization or customer service.

Those are the accountants who believe they have more to offer to their customers than the Big Six firms, where many gained their early experience. Discount corporate-tax services are a natural for CPAs. But who could have imagined profitable niches in accounting for farmer-owned cooperatives, equine businesses, or child-care providers?

That means it's likelier that a firm has either specialized in your industry or acquired some expertise in it. It also means you can shop around for different accounting services. When dealing with specialty firms, you can also often cut costs and enhance quality by unbundling your accounting services.

Depending on your company's needs and internal capabilities, that might mean handling billing, collection, and accounts payable internally, and outsourcing your payroll, hiring a tax specialist to handle IRS and state filings, and then, as your company grows, contracting for a part-time chief financial officer.

See "A Shopper's World," below. Listen to Richard Colombik, a CPA and lawyer who left the Big Eight behind him to run a small firm that has 10 professionals working out of six Illinois locations. So every time I build up a new core of business, we open a new office close to our customers. That's one of the ways that I feel we can be more flexible and more receptive to our clients' needs than a larger firm would be.

Can the smallest accounting firms survive the competitive onslaught they face from large firms and the burgeoning networks? You didn't have to worry about people skills or selling your firm. Those days are over. But if the changes within accounting firms have been largely positive for their customers, there are some risks as well.

The biggest of those risks concerns a shift within the profession's ethical guidelines, as set by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. Accounting firms can now sell commission-based products--including investments, insurance, and the like--so long as they disclose their cut to customers and do it through the establishment of a separate subsidiary. Given their potential profits from doing consulting work, the Big Six have less incentive to move in that direction than midsize and small firms do.

For those firms--especially the ones that have yet to find a profitable specialty niche--investment fees might well look too enticing to resist. So far, that's a call many accounting firms don't know how to make. So most are sitting on the sidelines. Here again, American Express's involvement complicates matters, since that company will undoubtedly try to hawk products to its accountants' customers. The outcome of many of these trends is still far from clear.

But for the consumers of accounting services at this end of the market, there's simply no ambiguity: this is a buyer's market. Jill Andresky Fraser is Inc. What does all the brouhaha within the accounting profession mean for the owners of small and fast-growing companies? The company's president, Tom Stewart, founded the business four years ago in partnership with his brother Bob, who's vice-president. Tom and Bob's sister Julie is the director of business operations.

The three ran Sportsheets out of their home until just last year. The implication was, call them when we had some more numbers. With McGovern's assistance, the Stewarts have put together a financial team at a price range and level of service that fits their business to a T.

Years ago, companies this small never could have split their accounting business into multiple, smaller accounts and then scanned the marketplace for specialists to satisfy each need. And if someone is an expert in Service A but not in Service B--well, they can shop around and find that person, too. And it's working for the Stewarts.