Why am I getting grief? Do bookkeepers hate accountants?
So I'm an accountant and I prepare the year-end accounts for a few clients that have their bookkeeping done by self-employed bookkeepers.
There are some jobs that I've picked up and they've been a little messy so I've tidied them up when doing the accounts, I've then sent a polite email to the bookkeepers once the accounts have been done to provide them with the opening balance adjustments and also some pointers about things that I may have picked up that weren't minor. I won't tell them about small tweaks I've had to make.
One example is that a bookkeeper posts their own year-end adjustments for a client and then reverses them back out on the first day of the new financial year, the issue here is that these adjustments aren't the final figures, so once they've posted the opening balance adjustments that I've provided them with to make their TB agree to the accounts, then their reversals actually knock out the opening balances in next year's accounts so the brought forward TB doesn't agree because of this.
I politely asked the bookkeper to not post the reversals as it then causes extra work when preparing the accounts, then there was a very defensive email back to me saying that they are a qualified bookkeeper and have been working for X number of years, they aren't causing any problems and they're saving their client time and money and they've always done it and it's not an issue. So rather than say ok no problem, they blew a fuse for no apparent reason.
I tried to explain again why this is, explaining their prepayments and accruals were not the figures in the final accounts and how this worked, they shot back again with more defensive remarks. In this situation I just didn't respond to them after this as they clearly weren't receiving a request from one professional to another very well, and I will just continue to remove their adjustments and do the accounts as normal, costing the client more money..
My point is, there are times where bookkeepers I've dealt with are pleasant and welcoming of feedback, however it seems the majority of the time they feel offended and like I'm saying they're bad at their job and don't know what they're doing, which I'm really not, I'm just trying to ask them to make slight changes to aid with the accounts process.
Am I just coming up against sensitive bookkeepers here or do bookkeepers just not like accountants?