Hello, I’m in a weird situation with my accountant and was hoping to hear some opinions/experiences to understand which one of us is crazy here.

I purchased a small business in January 2022. I filed taxes for 2022 with an online accountant and then got an extension for 2023 as I wanted time to find a more experienced accountant to file for that year. I wanted them to look at 2022 to see if any corrections needed to be made, file 2023, clean up the books and give general guidance for going forward.

I decided to engage an accountant that the previous business owner was using because they were already familiar with the business, were local and seemed to have good reviews. I engaged them in March and met with them in late April to go over our business and what we were needing. After the meeting, one of the junior PMs from the firm, we’ll call her Stacy, contacted me and my bookkeeper with a list of documents and reports we needed to submit. My bookkeeper and I pulled all the reports and documents and submitted to Stacy within a couple of weeks, by mid-May. After that I got sent a budget for this project, which came in a bit under $5K, which is fine. The budget outlined year end tasks, reviews, fillings and some meetings to go over everything.

After I submitted the documents and approved the budget I asked Stacy if there was anything else she needed and she said no. At that point I assumed they were working on the fillings. After I didn’t hear from them for more than a month, I followed up in late June to see what the status was. Stacy reached back out, saying she will put a budget together(even though I already received one in May). She sends over the budget, I approve it again, and Stacy says she now is working on another project, so she won’t be able to do anything before July 15th.

I follow up around July 15th, and Stacy now says that we cannot move forward because she doesn’t have access to our QuickBooks, since we only have the desktop version and not the online one. She states that she absolutely needs to get in there and that we cannot proceed with filling without it. At that point the senior accountant we originally engaged reached out and says that him and his IT guy is trying to figure out how to gain access to our desktop QB. I talk to the IT guy as well, we decide on a remote computer access option, and I give directions to my bookkeeper on how to set this up.

Another two weeks go by, we are in the first days of August now, and there still has not been any movement on them actually logging into our remote access. I called Stacy yesterday, and she says she is busy this week and won’t have time to look at anything, so I should follow up next week.

In the meantime, I receive an invoice from them yesterday, for $1300. The invoice includes a “breakdown” of work they’ve done, which originally came in at $1700 but was discounted to $1300. The work breakdown includes time billed for literally every single interaction they’ve had with me. The original meeting where the senior accountant took time to shoot the shit and show me around his office is billed hourly for $525. Every email that they have written to me is billed hourly. The time they took to print out and organize the reports I sent over is billed at $78. The time he himself called me to explain the QB access is billed on hourly bases. There are 3 separate line items for them putting together the budget for this project l, again billed hourly at nearly $400.

I was literally flabbergasted. I don’t have a ton of experience working with accountants, but any time I did before it was just a flat fee to file taxes and some consulting. I’m pretty pissed, because from my understanding we are no closer to filling then we were when I originally engaged them in April. Can you guys who have experience with it tell me if I’m the one who is crazy here or if they are? I don’t mind paying for work done, but I never imagined I would be charged for LITERALLY every email and phone call they have sent to me, while the bill does not include ANY actual filling work. One line item is just “helping Stacy”, again billed on an hourly bases.

Thanks for reading and looking forward to hearing which one of us needs to touch grass here.