ARTICLE - 7 MIN READ
Who is best placed to solve a financial problem?
Your accountant or someone else - and how do you decide?
“Don’t we need an accountant to help us with our finance problem?”
Maybe.
In some situations, absolutely.
If you have a technical tax question, need specialist accountancy advice or have a problem that clearly sits within an accountant’s area of expertise, speaking to an accountant may be exactly the right thing to do.
Accountants are trained specialists. If you need specialist expertise, it makes sense to go to someone who has it.
But there is another possibility.
Not every problem that shows up in the finances of a business is, at its root, a finance problem.
Equally, it may absolutely be a finance problem.
And that’s what can make deciding who you need confusing.
Because at this point, you may know where the problem is showing up, but not yet know what's actually causing it.
That’s when it can be useful to pause before deciding who should solve it.
Start with the problem, not the job title
When something feels wrong financially, the natural reaction is often to look towards finance.
Cash is tight. Debts are increasing. The numbers don’t look right. Management information is unreliable. Margins are changing. Invoices are not being raised or paid as expected. The finance team is constantly firefighting.
All of those things can quite reasonably be described as financial problems. But that doesn’t necessarily tell you what’s causing them.
Finance is often where the impact of problems elsewhere in a business eventually becomes visible.
The cause may sit in finance. But it may also sit in sales, operations, systems, processes, workload, ownership, communication, leadership or somewhere between several of those areas.
That distinction matters.
Because if you solve only what’s visible, without understanding what created it, there’s a risk that you fix the symptom while leaving the underlying problem in place to appear again in the future.
A cashflow problem might not start with cashflow
Take an overdue invoice. On the surface, that looks like a finance problem.
And sometimes it is.
Perhaps statements are not being sent. Debts are not being followed up properly. Nobody has clear responsibility for credit control.
But imagine finance can’t collect an overdue invoice because the customer is disputing it. Finance asks operations for evidence that the work was completed.
Operations can’t provide everything needed because key information was missing when the customer account or job was originally set up.
Suddenly the problem looks rather different.
The immediate symptom is still the same - cash hasn’t arrived.
But the chain behind it might run through customer onboarding, sales, operations, record keeping and finally finance.
You could ask someone to improve credit control. That might help with the immediate debt.
But it wouldn’t necessarily stop the same problem happening again.
To do that, you’d need to understand where in the chain the problem is actually being created.
And that’s why I think about problems across a business rather than automatically assigning them to whichever department they happen to appear in.
Sometimes the problem really is in finance
The opposite is also true.
Financial information might be incorrect because somebody has misunderstood VAT, payroll, pensions, CIS or another technical aspect.
Perhaps they need additional technical training. Perhaps the business needs specialist advice.
In that situation, an accountant or another appropriately qualified specialist may be exactly who you need.
But even then, there’s sometimes another layer.
Why did the error happen? Was the person properly trained? Were responsibilities clear? Did they have enough time? Was anyone checking the work? Did they know where to go when they were unsure? Did they feel able to escalate that something was becoming unmanageable?
A technical error can be technical. It can also expose a wider problem around capacity, ownership, controls or management.
To genuinely solve a problem, no possibility should be instantly assumed or ruled out.
That doesn’t automatically mean somebody’s failed. Businesses change, workloads grow, responsibilities blur and processes that once worked well can, over time, stop working.
Solving the problem properly sometimes means being willing to say, “We don’t yet know exactly why this is happening,” and then looking at it without trying to find somewhere to pin the blame.
So how do you decide what kind of help you need?
I’d start with a few questions.
Not because every business problem needs turning into an enormous diagnostic exercise. Most don’t.
But because answering these questions can help you avoid choosing the solution before you understand the problem.
Do you actually know what’s causing it?
If all you know is that cash is tight, reports are wrong or invoices are not being paid, then you know where the problem is showing up, but you don’t necessarily know what’s creating it.
If you only know the symptom, it may simply be too early to decide who should solve it.
Does it need specialist technical expertise?
Some problems do.
If the issue involves specialist accounting, tax, regulation or another technical area, the appropriate expertise matters.
But sometimes that need only becomes obvious once the practical details around the problem have been uncovered.
You might first need to establish what has happened before anybody can sensibly advise on what should happen next.
Does the problem cross departments or processes?
If sales, operations, finance, systems and people are all involved, looking at one department in isolation may not get you very far.
Problems that cross departments are rarely solved well by treating each team as a separate island. Sometimes the most useful thing is helping the different people involved understand how their part affects what happens next.
That doesn’t automatically mean you need someone with a broad role.
It means the person investigating it needs to be able to follow the problem wherever the evidence goes.
Is there practical groundwork to do before specialist advice is needed?
Sometimes there’s quite a lot.
Records may need reconciling. Different versions of events may need piecing together. A process may need following from beginning to end. Information may need cleaning up. People may need to be asked what actually happens rather than what the documented process says should happen.
Only then does it become clear whether specialist input is required.
Are you solving something once, or trying to stop it happening again?
Those can require very different approaches.
Collecting one overdue invoice is one problem. Understanding why invoices repeatedly become difficult to collect is another.
Correcting one accounting error is one task. Understanding why the same kind of error keeps happening may take you somewhere else entirely.
Both matter. But they aren’t necessarily the same piece of work.
This isn't accountant versus non-accountant
That’s not really the point.
And it would also be unfair to suggest that accountants only deal with accounts and tax. Many accountancy firms offer management information, outsourced finance functions, advisory services, systems support and other broader services. Some accountants also have extensive operational and commercial experience.
The point isn’t to decide that an accountant can or cannot solve a particular problem because of their job title.
It’s to apply the same thinking to every situation, what does this particular problem actually require, and who is best placed to provide it?
Sometimes the answer will be an accountant. Sometimes it’ll be someone with a broader operational or problem-solving view.
Sometimes several people need to work together.
And sometimes one person will do the groundwork that makes it clear which specialist needs to become involved next.
The question I would ask first
If you’re dealing with a financial problem and your instinct is to speak to your accountant, that may be exactly the right next step.
There’s no reason not to do that simply because another option exists.
But if you aren’t yet clear what’s causing the problem, or you can see that it involves – or could involve - several parts of the business, it may be worth understanding the situation before deciding who should solve it.
The most useful question is probably not, “Do I need an accountant?”
It’s, “What kind of problem am I actually trying to solve?”
Sometimes getting to the answer also means accepting that nobody in the business may have the full picture. That’s not unusual. Different people often hold different pieces of it.
But once you know the kind of problem you are trying to solve, choosing the right person, or people, becomes much easier.