You know you should be working on your business, not in it. So you’ve finally decided to leave your glory days of crunching numbers and maintaining tax records behind you.
Now you’re ready to hand off these responsibilities to someone who lives and breathes financials. Someone whose dreams involve finding tax reliefs and filing tax returns!
As a business owner, however, you don’t need any reminders about the challenges of hiring the right talent. That’s why we’ve put together this list of questions to help you find a top-caliber eCommerce accountant without settling for anything less.
So be sure to bring these up the next time you’re talking to a potential accountant for your store.
Do You Have Any Experience With eCommerce?
Digital commerce comes with its own set of tax and financial challenges. You cannot hope to navigate these waters without a veteran by your side.
An accountant who specializes in eCommerce has already faced the vast majority of challenges and opportunities that your business ever
will. They know how to balance the risk and reward of every move because they’ve already seen it play out dozens of times.
Just think about it. If you had a heart condition, who would you rather work with? A surgeon who specializes in brain surgery? Or someone who performs heart surgeries on the regular? Both are experts at performing surgical operations on the human body. But obviously, the heart surgeon is the go-to specialist for all things heart-related.
Don’t think that your bookkeeping and tax challenges won’t require the same level of specialist experience. With the ever-growing list of software solutions, sales channels, payment methods, global workforce, and cost of goods expenses—just to name a few broad categories—there’s a lot of learning curve involved in handling eCommerce accounting.
If someone has a hard time understanding what your brand does and how exactly you make money, which many non-tech-savvy accounts
will, can you really count on them to handle the complexities of digital commerce? Of course not.
So toss out any candidates that don’t specialize in eCommerce.
Can You Name Any Six eCommerce Sales Channels You’ve Worked With?
Since there’s nothing stopping people from claiming they have eCommerce experience, you shouldn’t take them on their word alone.
Do some digging and stretch your creative muscles to ask some pressing questions. For starters, see if they can name six or more eCommerce sales channels. Someone who specializes in eCommerce will easily know more than the big three (Amazon, Shopify, eBay).
See what they have to say about other platforms. If it sounds like they don’t know what they’re talking about, they probably don’t specialize in online retail.
Here are some other questions you could ask:
- Which inventory tracking solution would you recommend for multichannel eCommerce?
- Do you have any ideas for increasing our Amazon FBA reimbursements?
- Would using a 3PL make a difference for our accounting strategy?
Who Will Be Doing the Work?
Accountants outsourcing their client’s work to a third-party contractor is far from unheard of.
Now, this doesn’t automatically mean that you’re going to get substandard service. Any long-term thinking accountant will only outsource the grunt work to a competent individual and handle the strategic side of things by themselves.
Nonetheless, they need to be upfront about this, as you deserve to know who’s working on your account. A business relationship is the same as any other relationship. It can only work if they’re honest and upfront. Telling you whether they outsource is a big part of it.
What’s Your Communication Policy?
Nobody likes to stay in the dark. So unless you want to hand off your books once and forget all about them, you should work with someone who’s easy to get a hold of when needed.
So be sure to ask your accountant about their communication policies. This includes things like how and when you can reach out to them. Whether you prefer the clarity of phone calls or the brevity of emails, bring up your preferences and see how the accountant feels about it.
Furthermore, every accountant has a different strategy for communication. Some like to keep their head down and power through your accounting needs. Others like to communicate more frequently and keep you involved. Making sure that their preferences align with yours is key here to success here.
Finally, you want to know if your accountant offers year-round services. This may come as a surprise if you’ve never worked with an accountant, but some professionals limit their services to the tax season only.
So if you’d rather work with someone who’ll keep your books updated throughout the year instead of waiting for the last quarter, be sure that your accountant offers year-round services.
Can You Give Some Examples of Deductions You Can Help My Business Claim?
Even if an accountant isn’t familiar with your specific business, they will have no trouble giving you some examples of little-known deductions for eCommerce businesses.
For instance, not only does the tax code allow deducting home office expenses in some cases, but it’s also possible to deduct inventory storage costs—even if that’s just a spare storage room in your house.
Similarly, you can file any software purchases and subscriptions as business expenses too. This can include charges like your Shopify platform fees, hosting fees, and more. Even marketing tools like aHrefs for SEO or JungleScout for finding product opportunities can be tax-deductible.
Will My Data Be Safe?
Can you imagine handing off revenue and profitability data for all your products and sales channels to a total stranger? Well, you don’t have to imagine because this is exactly what you’ll be doing when working with an accountant.
So it’s crucial that they have systems in place to keep your data safe. This can include legal protections like NDAs and other contracts, cybersecurity systems like anti-virus and anti-malware solutions, and perhaps even a subscription with a security firm to keep their devices safe at all times.
If your accountant can’t give you a clear answer to this, then they probably don’t have any data protection and cybersecurity systems in place.
What’s Your Accounting Philosophy?
This is a big one. Some accountants adhere to a philosophy of grabbing the easiest wins and ignoring everything else. Anything with the slightest hint of complexity is avoided. The result is a straightforward accounting process that saves them time and achieves the minimum acceptable results for the clients.
As you can imagine, that means a lot of money left on the table for the client’s business. This is why we highly recommend working with competent accountants who are willing to take calculated measures and bring your tax bills as low as possible.
There are so many legal and ethical ways to lower your bills. You shouldn’t be paying anything less or more than that.
For instance, some accountants stay away from filing eCommerce marketing expenses as a tax deduction because they don’t want to deal with the hassle of keeping records for it. But with the right planning, any and all of your business expenses can be written off.
If you’d like to work with eCommerce accounting veterans who know the ins and outs of digital commerce, Just Jump Business Solutions is exactly what you’re looking for. Our team takes pride in helping businesses like yours minimize both your tax bill and your financial headaches.
Book your free, zero-obligation consultation today to see what our eCommerce accounting veterans can achieve for your business.
