What accountants actually want from their clients' books

Stop paying your accountant to fix basic errors. Here's exactly what we look for when we open a client's file.

As accountants ourselves, we know exactly what goes through your accountant's mind when they open your file at tax time. We've been on both sides of this relationship, and we've seen what costs clients money.

Here's the honest truth about what we look for, and what we dread finding.

What we love to see

• Reconciled bank accounts, including savings, credit cards, and loan accounts.
• Consistent, accurate categorisation of income and expenses.
• Outstanding invoices properly tracked, not just sitting in a drawer.
• GST codes applied correctly and consistently throughout the year.
• Receipts attached or filed against each transaction.

What we dread finding

• Three months of unreconciled transactions.
• Personal expenses mixed in with business ones.
• Transactions coded to 'miscellaneous' or 'other' because the owner wasn't sure.
• Duplicate entries from manual data entry.
• No record of the opening balances when the client switched software.

The cost of messy books

When your accountant has to fix basic errors, you're paying their hourly rate to do work that should have been done throughout the year. In our practice, we've seen end-of-year clean-up bills that run into thousands of dollars. All of them are preventable.

Good bookkeeping isn't just about compliance. It's about not wasting money on your accountant doing data entry.

How BookFlo helps

BookFlo was designed specifically around what accountants need from a set of books. The reports we generate are structured for accountants, not just business owners. And because BookFlo integrates directly with Reckon, your data is always in a format your accountant can work with immediately.

By BookFlo Team · March 2025