A freelancing friend of mine (we’ll call her Katie) used to suffer, every year, from what I called her Month of Madness. In that month – the one immediately preceding the deadline for her online tax return submission – she was best avoided.
Katie doesn’t do numbers, and doesn’t really do computers, either. Why she didn’t complete a paper tax return, then, I hear you ask? She always intended to get everything ready for the paper 
return deadline, and always failed – because mayhem ensued when she tried to organise her paperwork. So she would spend the next few months dreading filling in the online version and drowning in the paperwork she’d dragged out to fill in the paper return…
She ignored all helpful information sent by HMRC, convinced that it would be too complicated for her to understand – but she was equally convinced an accountant was an unnecessary expense that would eat her profits. Until one day, sitting in her study surrounded by a snowdrift of paper and bravely trying to help, I asked Katie where she’d put the copies of her electric and water bills.
Katie frowned. “Why would I need those?”
“Do you just claim flat rate then? I’m impressed. Very sensible,” I said, squinting at her mysterious invoice numbers as I tried to marry them up with the credits on her bank statement.
There was a short silence. “Flat rate?”
I looked up. “Yes, you know. For part of your house expenses. Electricity, gas, water…”
“Oh I don’t claim for anything like that!” She looked at me as though I’d gone mad. “It’s not like I only use the house for the business, is it! I live here, and so do the kids.”
Cue the sound of me hitting my head repeatedly on her bank statement folder…
Luckily, by the end of the conversation (which revealed the true horror of her many unclaimed expenses), I’d managed to convince her that she had a lot to gain from a chat with an accountant, and in the next week I arranged a few quotes that pleasantly surprised her. She’d never even bothered to enquire about accountancy costs; she’d just presumed that employing an accountant to do her tax return would be prohibitively expensive.
She’s still not that great at filing away invoices and receipts, but she has improved. Knowing she can save money is a great motivator. And she was delighted by how much money the accountant saved her just in the first year – much more than his fee.
Not only has Katie’s accountant saved her money, he’s also saved her a great deal of stress. She trusts him to complete her tax return correctly and claim everything he can on her behalf. She also knows it will be submitted well within the deadline (in the past, she’s been perilously close to paying a late submission fee more times than I care to remember).
So the Month of Madness is no more. She’ll even invite me out for a coffee when the tax return deadline is only a fortnight away (although she was disappointed to learn she couldn’t claim for that on her expenses).
All hail Katie’s accountant!