Today, many good and cheap accounting programs in Norway make it easy for many company owners to do their own accounts without an accountant. The big question many of them ask themselves is: Do I need an accountant? In this article, we will look at this topic and give you our advice.
Do you need an accountant?
Many company owners buy a license from one of the accounting programs (Tripletex, Conta, Fiken, and many others) and think that since they now have a program, it will be fine to do their accounts by themselves. In a way, you could say that because Norwegian law does not require them to use an accountant. However, many of them often find that the need for an accountant shows up, often after they have tried to do the accounting by themselves for a while, discovered that they have made mistakes and need to submit a tax return and annual accounts.
What many company owners don’t think about when they start doing their accounting by themselves is that it takes much longer time to correct an error than just to do it right from the beginning. Even relatively small errors, for instance regarding VAT codes can lead to many hours of correcting them. The reason for this is that new bank reconciliations must be made, and new VAT reports need to be corrected and reconciled.
Another thing that many company owners who do their accounts by themselves don’t realize is that you don’t necessarily get notified every time you make a mistake if you use one of those programs. You can submit a tax return and annual accounts by yourself, but will it be correct? You can’t know that unless you are an accountant yourself and very few business owners are. In the worst case, you risk paying either too much or too little tax. You don’t need to think about it when a good accountant has submitted the tax return and annual accounts for you.
When an accounting firm submits a tax return for you it means that entries have been carefully checked and possible errors and discrepancies have been eliminated, because the whole year has been reconciled. There are often many hours of work behind such an annual reconciliation, but it is necessary for the result to be good.
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