Hi folks
I am conducting a survey on the evaluation of the relationship between small businesses and practice accountants. The aim of the study is to explore the benefits that both parties could gain by changing the nature of their relationship from a transaction based to a partnering relationship .
I would greatly appreciate it if you are able to please complete a questionnaire using the link below . The estimated time to complete the survey is about 5-7 minutes.
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/Survey-Accountants
All the data that you provide will be anonymous and confidential.
If you have any questions or require any further information please feel free to contact me
Thank you in advance for your participation.
Thanks
Simba
Replies (8)
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Why are you doing it?
Market research? Student thesis?
Your question is confusing, but I think that is because you have typed "transnational" when you meant "transactional". Assuming I am correct then the answer to the question is "What makes you think that they don't?".
False premise
Anyway, Q3. Is your business turnover less than £6.5m?
Yes, it is. Hope that helps you.
Cutting through this
Accountants are generally keen to be proactive and provide the non-compliance services. Some darling clients are reluctant to pay for them either because a) they do not understand the concepts and so would not be able to control the process and measure success themselves and b) they believe that they should have the service, and free as of right, because they have paid a fee for the compliance work.
It can dampen the enthusiasm.
I agree with Andy
Clients may say they want these extra services, but few are willing to pay for them, and of those that do, few of them actually appreciate it and come up with every excuse under the sun not to follow our advice.
Real life
In an ideal world clients would appreciate everything we do and would pay us for the benefits they receive. In reality they only want to pay the bare minimum to meet their statutory needs.
They ask us to quote for x and we do. We offer y and z for additional fees. They decline. We do x. We charge the agreed amount. They then say 'why didn't you provide y?' 'You didn't want y' we reply. 'But I'm paying you' 'No. You're paying us for x, which we've done' and so on.
You can offer as many services as you want but at the end of the day most clients won't part with the money for them. And since my experience of relationships with partners is that they cost me money, stress me out and end in grief, I'm damned if I'm going to have a partnering relationship with a client :)
Take another try
As others have indicated, you are starting from a flawed premise. You have made a false assumption about accountants, that they aren't willing to offer other services. As you have discovered, starting out with this premise is something that accountants find irritating. I suggest you go back and start over taking the above comments on board. I have a few other observatons about the survey itself.
For an anonymised study, you are asking for a lot of personal information (turnover, number of employees, etc). Anyone who answers all your questions is likely to be identifiable from the resulting data. Think about what you really need to know and restrict the personal data to that.
Cut out the buzz-speak and use clear English. Willingness to engage in a more partnering relationship (question 10) and creativity (question 11) are both open to wide interpretation, which will render your results meaningless. As for question 13, a handful of these are standard techniques (SWOT, Bench marking) but you then go on to throw in nonsensical sounding phrases (Use of utilization statistics?) and things accountants should avoid getting directly involved in (conflict resolution).
Incidentally, it is possible to click all five boxes on every line of question 13. You probably don't want that.