However, when you are self-employed, or if you run a business, you’ll need to deal with your taxes yourself. This is often the time of year that small business owners and sole traders dread; their tax return has to be filed by 31st January each year (and the money owed has to be paid by then too). If there are any delays, you can be given a fine, and this can soon add up. 

Many people who worry about getting their taxes done on time will hire an accountant to help them. If you’ve never done this before and you think it’s a waste of money, you might want to think again when you realise just how much help an accountant can be. Read on to find out just some of the reasons to hire an accountant to help you with your tax and accounting services.

One of the biggest reasons to hire an accountant to do your taxes for you is that taxes are very complicated. We’re not just saying that either; even the most straightforward tax return can involve plenty of complex calculations, and unless you’re an expert, this can all seem rather overwhelming. 

When you hire an accountant, you won’t have to worry about learning tax codes and understanding why this number goes here and that one goes there. You can pass everything over to someone who spends all their time doing exactly this kind of work, safe in the knowledge that you can get back to doing what you’re good at. 

Even if you do understand taxes and you’re pretty good at financial work, completing your tax return is still going to take some time. Many hours, in fact. And if you don’t find the work overly interesting, you might spread that time out over the course of days or weeks. In the end, you’ll spend a lot more of your precious time on this one tax return than is really necessary, and you’ll be less productive in the central core of your business as a result. 

To save all this time and to allow you to concentrate on what you do best, hire an accountant. Because an expert accountant completes tax returns for a living, they will be able to do the work much more quickly than you ever could, ensuring that you save a tremendous amount of time and receive a complete tax return efficiently and quickly. 

Although you can hire an account to simply complete your tax return on your behalf, and although they will certainly do this very well, ensuring you don’t end up with a fine from HMRC, you can also speak to the accountant you have chosen about financial planning for you and your business. 

Your accountant should be able to offer you advice to help with your financial future, enabling you to budget better and grow your business in the way you want to. Remember, when you’re self-employed, good financial planning is essential since it will impact not just your business but your personal life too. 

It’s true that if you complete your tax return by yourself, you won’t have to pay an expert to do it. However, this could be a false economy for a number of different reasons. The first is that if you make a mistake, you could be fined. That mistake might also lead to an underpayment or overpayment in taxes, neither of which is easy or quick to rectify. You might even open yourself up to an audit if you continue to make errors in your tax returns. 

The second reason you can save money by hiring an accountant even if you are paying for their services is that they will know how tax laws work, and they will know how to reduce your tax bill legally, ethically, and correctly. Without this in depth knowledge of taxes, if you completed your tax return yourself, you could easily miss the fact that you can legally save money and pay what you owe without realising that discounts could apply. This fact alone is well worth the cost of an accountant you might want to hire.