Most people arrive at a first meeting with an accountant prepared to be assessed, having assembled documents and rehearsed an explanation of a complicated year. That posture is backwards. The meeting is a mutual interview, the person paying is the one making a hiring decision, and twenty minutes of questions will settle it more reliably than any amount of document preparation. The six below are the ones that reliably separate a good fit from a poor one. The answers described are composites of how these conversations tend to go rather than anybody's actual words, and nobody is being quoted here.
What Kind of Clients Do You Mostly Work For?
This is the question that decides most of the outcome and it is asked least. An accountant whose practice is largely salaried individuals with a rental property is excellent at that and has limited reason to be current on the issues facing a two person contracting business, and the reverse is equally true. Neither is a deficiency. It is specialization, and it means the useful answer is a description of a client base rather than an assurance that they handle everything.
A good answer sounds specific and slightly narrow: mostly small trades and service businesses, a number of rental owners, a handful of professional practices. A weak answer is a claim of universal competence, which is either untrue or means the practice is a volume operation where the work is done to a template. Somebody whose typical client resembles you has seen your situation dozens of times and will spot in a minute what a generalist would spend an hour reasoning through.
Who Will Actually Prepare My Return?
In many practices the person in the meeting is not the person doing the work, and there is nothing wrong with that provided everybody knows. A return prepared by a staff member and reviewed by the principal is a normal and efficient arrangement. What causes trouble is the client who believes they have engaged a particular person's judgment and has in fact engaged a firm's process, then discovers the difference when a question needs answering in August.
Ask who prepares, who reviews, and who answers a question during the year. The third part matters most, because tax questions arrive in June when a decision is being made rather than in April when a return is filed. A practice that says clearly which person to call, and whether that call is billed, is describing a working relationship that a client can plan around, and a practice that is vague about it is describing one too, just less flatteringly and without meaning to.
How Do You Charge, and What Makes the Number Go Up?
The structures vary and none is wrong. Flat fees by return type, hourly, or a monthly arrangement covering bookkeeping and the return together are all defensible, and the important part is the second half of the question. What makes a fee rise is usually one of three things: records arriving in poor condition, a late delivery that pushes work into the busiest weeks, or something new in the year that requires research. Each of those is within the client's control, which is what makes the answer worth having.
An accountant who answers that candidly is telling you how to be an inexpensive client, which is genuinely useful information and which nobody volunteers unless asked. One who declines to put a range on it before seeing the work is being reasonable, and one who will not discuss the subject at all is not, since fees are the one term of the engagement that both parties are certain to care about. The follow up worth asking is what a client like you typically pays in a normal year, since a range with a reason attached is more informative than a precise figure that turns out to be conditional.
What Do You Need From Me, and by When?
The answer reveals how organized the practice is and how much of the burden falls on the client. A clear response includes a document list, a date, and a description of what happens if that date is missed. A practice that has thought about this will hand over a checklist without being asked, because a season in which clients arrive prepared is a considerably more pleasant season than one spent chasing missing documents in the last fortnight of March.
The date matters more than people expect. Delivering records in the first week of March produces a different quality of attention than delivering them in the last week, and any honest preparer will say so. Somebody who claims that timing makes no difference is either lightly booked, which is worth knowing before hiring them, or not being straight about how the season actually runs, which is worth knowing considerably sooner than the following April.
What Happens If I Get a Notice?
Notices are ordinary and the response to this question is a good test of what the relationship actually includes. Some practices handle correspondence at no additional charge as part of standing behind the return. Some bill for it hourly. Some treat representation as an entirely separate engagement. All three are legitimate positions and the client needs to know which one applies before the envelope arrives rather than during the week it does. Notices arrive at inconvenient times by definition, and the terms should already be settled by then.
Also worth asking is what happens if the notice results from an error in the preparation. Most preparers will correct their own mistake without charge and will not absorb the tax itself, which was owed in any case, and that is a reasonable position stated plainly. What matters is hearing the answer in a calm month rather than discovering it during a stressful one, when the temptation is to agree to whatever arrangement will make the letter go away fastest.
What Do You Think I Should Be Doing Differently?
This is the question that reveals whether somebody is buying a filing service or an advisor, and it should be asked at the end when the accountant has seen enough to say something. A useful answer names one or two specific things: a record that is not being kept, an election worth examining, a structure that no longer fits, a quarterly estimate built on a stale figure. It is fine for the answer to be that nothing obvious stands out.
What is not fine is an answer that stays entirely general, because it usually means the person is not looking at this particular situation. The whole reason to hire a preparer rather than use software is that software cannot ask a question the taxpayer did not know to raise, and somebody who does not raise one in a first meeting is unlikely to raise one in year three. Twenty minutes of this is a cheap way to find out, and it happens before anybody has paid for anything.