What should we expect from our accountant?

It is one of the most common conversations a founder has about finance, and it is almost always phrased as a suspicion rather than a complaint. Something is not right about what we get from our accountant, and I do not know whether that is them or whether this is just what accountants do.

The uncertainty is the problem. Nobody told the founder what the standard is, so they cannot tell whether they are being underserved or asking for something that was never in scope.

Here is the standard, in both directions.

What is reasonable to expect

A CA firm engaged for accounting and compliance in an Indian startup should reliably deliver all of this.

• ·Books that are accurate, reconciled to the bank, and closed by an agreed working day each month. The date is negotiable. Having one is not.
• ·Every statutory filing on time: GST returns, TDS deposits and returns, PF and ESIC where applicable, advance tax, annual ROC filings and the income tax return.
• ·Advance warning of deadlines and of what they need from you, rather than a request on the day before.
• ·A response to a question within a few working days, and a clear answer to what the rule is on a specific transaction.
• ·A trial balance, P&L and balance sheet you can actually get hold of, in a format that does not change every month.
• ·No surprises at the audit. Anything the auditor is going to insist on should have been raised during the year, not produced as an adjustment in September.
• ·And a straight answer when something has gone wrong, including when it was their error.

That list is not demanding. A firm meeting all of it is doing the job it was hired for, and a great many do.

What is not reasonable to expect

Most of the disappointment sits here, and it is a scope problem rather than a quality one.

• ·Commentary on what the numbers mean. A P&L with an explanation of why the margin moved is a different piece of work and it was probably not in the engagement.
• ·Forward-looking analysis. A model, a forecast, a plan, a scenario. Accounting looks backwards by construction.
• ·A view on pricing, unit economics, or which customers make money. These require knowing your business rather than your ledger.
• ·Chasing your receivables, or telling you your collections are slipping.
• ·Investor reporting. A pack built for someone deciding whether to give you money is not a statutory output.
• ·Proactively telling you something is wrong with the business. Unless it is a compliance issue, it is not what they were engaged to watch.
• ·And same-day availability. A firm serving forty clients cannot be on call for one.

Founders read the absence of these as the accountant being unhelpful. In almost every case the accountant is doing exactly what was agreed, for the fee that was agreed, and nobody ever discussed the rest.

Most bad accountant relationships are a scope problem wearing the costume of a competence problem.

The conversation worth having first

Before deciding anything, have one deliberate conversation. It resolves a surprising share of these situations and it costs an hour.

1. 01Ask what is actually in scope today, in writing. Many engagements were agreed verbally three years ago and have drifted in both directions since.
2. 02Ask for a close date. Books shut by a specific working day each month, every month. This single change fixes more than anything else on this list, and a firm that will not commit to a date has told you something.
3. 03Name what you are missing, specifically. Not better reporting, which means nothing. A monthly pack with these lines, by this date, in this format.
4. 04Ask what that would cost, or whether they do it at all. Some firms have a genuine advisory arm. Many do not, and will say so.
5. 05Ask what slows them down. The answer is usually you: missing bills, late expense claims, unanswered questions. That part is fixable this month and it is free.
6. 06And agree how questions get handled: a single channel, a realistic response time, and who asks.

A firm that responds well to that conversation is worth keeping. A firm that cannot commit to a date, cannot describe its own scope, or becomes defensive is giving you the information you came for.

When the problem really is them

Some situations are not about scope, and they justify changing firms.

• ·Filings that are late, or that you learn about when a notice arrives. This is the clearest signal there is and it is the one thing the engagement definitely covered.
• ·Books that need correcting every time anyone examines them properly. Not the occasional adjustment, which is normal, but a pattern of errors found by whoever looks next.
• ·A close that has never happened on a predictable date despite being asked for repeatedly.
• ·An audit that produced a large volume of adjustments nobody could explain in advance.
• ·Questions that go unanswered for weeks, or answers that turn out to be wrong.
• ·Or an unwillingness to give you access to your own accounting system, which happens more often than it should.

Two of those together is enough. The cost of unreliable accounting is not the fee, it is every decision taken on numbers that were not right and the diligence conversation two years from now.

What changing firms actually costs

Worth knowing before deciding, because founders routinely underestimate it.

There is a handover: the new firm needs the ledger, the reconciliations, the fixed asset register, the filing history and the login credentials. A cooperative outgoing firm makes this a fortnight and an uncooperative one makes it a quarter.

There is a review period. Any competent incoming firm will examine the last year or two and find things. Some of those will need correcting, and corrections in closed periods are more work than getting it right first time.

And there is the knowledge that leaves. A firm that has done your books for three years knows your unusual transactions, your customer payment patterns and why a particular account exists. That understanding rebuilds over two or three closes.

None of which is a reason to keep a firm that is not doing the job. It is a reason to have the conversation first, and to time the change for the start of a financial year rather than the middle of one if the situation allows it.

What a reasonable fee actually buys

Fees in this market vary enormously and the variation is mostly about scope rather than quality, which is why comparing two quotes on price alone is unhelpful.

Ask any firm to state, in writing, which of these is included: monthly bookkeeping and how many transactions it assumes, bank reconciliation, GST return preparation and filing, TDS deposits and quarterly returns, payroll processing, PF and ESIC filings, annual accounts preparation, the statutory audit, the income tax return, and ROC filings.

Two things routinely sit outside a quoted fee and then arrive as extras. Audit is frequently separate, and where the auditor and the accountant are the same firm there are independence considerations your firm should raise before you do. And transaction volume assumptions matter: a fee quoted for a company processing two hundred transactions a month behaves differently at two thousand.

It is also worth asking who does the work. A partner in the meeting and an articled assistant on the ledger is an ordinary and perfectly workable arrangement, and it is better to know than to assume.

None of that tells you whether a fee is good value. What it does is let you compare two of them on the same basis, which is the part founders usually skip.

How to be a better client

Half of what founders experience as a slow accountant is a slow client, and this part is entirely within your control.

• ·Get bills and expense claims in by a cut-off date. Chasing missing documents is the single largest cause of a late close in most small companies.
• ·Answer their questions in a batch, quickly, rather than individually over three weeks.
• ·Give them read access to the bank rather than sending statements.
• ·Tell them about unusual transactions when they happen, not when they ask. A new entity, a large one-off, a change in how something is billed.
• ·Have one person on your side who owns the relationship, so questions do not route through whoever is free.
• ·And pay them on time, which is both obvious and frequently not what happens.

A firm that receives clean inputs on a schedule produces better work faster, and it is considerably more likely to go beyond scope when asked, because the relationship is not already consuming their patience.

Signals it is drifting before it breaks

Relationships with accountants rarely fail suddenly. They degrade, and the early signals are visible a couple of quarters before anyone calls it a problem.

• ·The close date slips by a few days, then a week, and nobody mentions it.
• ·Questions start being answered by somebody more junior than they used to be, which usually means your account has been reassigned.
• ·You begin receiving requests for information you have already sent.
• ·The annual accounts contain an adjustment nobody flagged during the year.
• ·Or the firm has grown and you have become one of their smaller clients, which is nobody's fault and does change the service.

Any of those is worth raising early and directly, while it is still a scheduling conversation rather than a grievance. Most firms respond well to being told plainly that the close date matters, and the ones that do not have answered the larger question.

What to do about the gap that remains

Assume the conversation has happened, the close now has a date, and the accounting is sound. There is still no commentary, no forward view and no answer to what the numbers mean.

That gap is real and it is not your accountant's to fill. It gets closed one of three ways: a founder who learns to do it, an internal finance hire once the operational volume justifies one, or senior judgement bought part time for the decisions that need it.

Which of those fits depends on the size of the company and on whether the missing thing is hours or interpretation. The published guides on the first finance hire and on what finance should look like at your revenue work through that choice in detail.

What matters here is the diagnosis. A founder who concludes their accountant is failing, replaces them, and discovers the new firm produces exactly the same output has spent a quarter and learned something they could have known from this page.

About Simplify

Simplify is a finance clarity and investment readiness practice working with founders across India, built on six years inside startups. We write about the questions founders bring before a decision, not after it.