How to instruct your accountant to get useful books

Your accountant's goal is not your goal

Your accountant does everything by the book, with a careful eye on tax law. That is what you pay them for, and you genuinely need it. But look closely at what they are actually aiming for:

Books that reflect your company in broad strokes — the big categories you are required to publish once you reach a certain size, and no finer.
Everything booked correctly for the tax declarations.
As efficient and time-saving as possible, so the office can serve many clients at low cost — in other words, every client booked to the same template.

That is a perfectly reasonable goal. It is simply not your goal. What you need to know is how the business is actually doing: how much you spend on your key objectives, how much goes to things that are not aligned with them — mere administration and company scaffolding — and how your cost centers and profit centers each perform. Those two lists barely touch, and the space between them is where your clarity quietly leaks away.

Your accountant doesn't know what makes your business tick

This is no criticism of your accountant — the problem is structural. Your business might look like others in your field, or it might be genuinely one of a kind. Either way, the odds are your accountant has you, and maybe one other firm in your field, sitting in a portfolio of many. They simply cannot know what makes your business tick the way you do. And most SMEs never instruct their accountant until a full-time CFO comes on board — if the company ever grows that far.

So, with no instruction to work from, they do the sensible thing and book everything to a generic template. The result is books that are clean and compliant — and tell you almost nothing about where the business is quietly squeaking and cracking. Most founders are fine with this, and you can see why. The books look fine. The taxman is happy and paid on time. The advisor says they did their best not to overpay. Sounds good enough. But “good enough” still leaves you without the data to actually manage with — to optimize what is working, or pinpoint where you excel. And that insight is the entire point.

First, work out what makes your business run

Before you talk to anyone, sit down with a pen and paper and think about what actually drives your business. A few examples to guide your brainstorming:

Do you live and die by marketing, like an FMCG firm? Then you probably want to track TV ads, Google ads, social, print, events and in-store sponsorships, each on its own line. Or is your whole marketing budget €15 a month and, frankly, not worth a second thought?
Do you run an IT firm, where it matters to split out server costs, software licenses, tool licenses and hardware? Or are you a brick-and-mortar business that can happily lump the laptop, the office software and even the internet subscription into one line called “IT”?
Do you have several locations? Or departments and teams whose costs, revenues and margins you'd like to compare against each other?

There is no universally right answer — only the right answer for you. The principle is simple: granular where it matters to your business, consolidated where it doesn't.

Then, tell your accountant

Now you have something to instruct with. Take it to your accountant and agree on three things:

The transactions that are core to your business get booked granularly and correctly.
The things that don't matter get consolidated. You do not need five lines in your reporting each tracking €3.78 a month.
Cost centers get set up in the bookkeeping package, with a clear rule for how each department's costs and revenues are allocated.

Then make sure the invoice flow works for everyone involved: that it is easy for you and for your staff, that a few words of context can travel with each invoice so the accountant knows what it was for, and — above all — that you, the decision-maker, receive the books in time to use them, rather than one day before the tax deadline. None of this is exotic. It is a single, structured conversation, and your accountant will almost certainly welcome it — because for once someone is telling them what the books are for.

What good looks like

You can hold your current books against this list:

Revenue is split by the streams you actually manage.
Your big, controllable costs each have their own line; the trivial ones are grouped.
Cost and profit centers let you compare the parts of your business against each other.
You receive the figures monthly, on a predictable date — not once a year.
The same things are booked the same way every period, so a trend is a real trend.
You can add context to an invoice, and reach the underlying data when you want it.

If most of that is true, you have books you can steer with. If it isn't, the good news is that almost all of it is a one-time setup, not a permanent new cost.

Frequently asked questions

What is a chart of accounts?

It is the master list of categories that every transaction is sorted into — the backbone of your general ledger. It quietly decides what you can and cannot see about your business, which is exactly why it is worth building around how you actually run things rather than a generic template.

How often should I get management accounts?

For most SMEs, monthly management accounts on a set date are the right rhythm — ideally within about ten working days of month-end. That is current enough to act on without becoming a burden for a small team. A once-a-year account is for compliance, not for steering the business.

Can I ask my accountant to restructure my books?

Yes. The structure of your books — in particular the chart of accounts — is not fixed by law or by the software; it is a set of choices, usually made once from a template and rarely revisited. Ask for it to reflect your real revenue streams and cost drivers, and most accountants will do it willingly once they understand what you are trying to see. It is a different goal from keeping you compliant, so you do have to ask.

What's the difference between a bookkeeper, an accountant and a controller?

A bookkeeper (in Dutch, a boekhouder) records your day-to-day transactions and keeps the administration in order. An accountant takes that administration and prepares formal, compliant accounts from it — the annual account you file. In many small businesses one firm does both, which blurs the line, but they are distinct jobs. A controller is the third role, and the one most SMEs are missing: not recording or filing, but interpreting the numbers and turning them into something you can actually run the business on.

Will my accounting software handle this?

Almost always, yes. Modern accounting packages handle multi-dimensional charts of accounts, cost centers and monthly closes as standard. When you hear a worry from your accountant, it usually means “that is more effort to set up” — a conversation about scope, not a genuine limit.

We're small — isn't this overkill, or too expensive?

It is the opposite of “more detail everywhere”: detail where it helps you decide, simplicity where it doesn't — which makes a small business easier to run, not harder. On cost, your accountant likely updates the books monthly already (for the VAT return), so much of this is a one-time setup. Even if the fee rises a little, it is far less than the cost of decisions made on stale numbers.

You could do this yourself. You probably shouldn't.

Let's be honest: none of this is beyond you. You could take the pen-and-paper list, sit down with your accountant, push the changes through and set up the reporting yourself. You are more than capable.

But you are a founder — a director, a manager — with an actual business to run. This is real work, and it will sit at the bottom of your list behind everything that feels more urgent, quarter after quarter. That is exactly what we take off your plate. As anoutsourced controller or fractional CFO,Schmidt Finance & Insight does this for SMEs like yours: we take stock of where your books stand today, design the schema of what you actually want to see, talk to your accountant in their own language and make sure it gets done, then put the timelines and automated reporting in place — so the clarity keeps coming without anyone lifting a finger.