One of the most common questions London business owners ask, often after a frustrating stretch of silence from their current firm, is deceptively simple: how often should I actually be hearing from my accountant across the year? The honest answer is that it genuinely depends on your business size, complexity and current stage of growth, but there are clear benchmarks that reliably separate a healthy communication rhythm from one that leaves you flying blind between deadlines. Too little contact and problems go unnoticed until it's expensive to fix them; too much unstructured contact and it starts to feel like noise rather than genuine, useful support.
The Bare Minimum Isn't Really Enough
At the very least, most businesses hear from their accountant around fixed statutory deadlines: year-end accounts, a self-assessment reminder, confirmation that a VAT return has been filed on time. If that's genuinely the full extent of your contact throughout the year, you're receiving basic compliance support rather than any kind of ongoing advisory relationship worth the name. This pattern is common among firms that treat clients as a batch of annual tasks to be processed rather than an ongoing business relationship to be actively managed, and it leaves owners without any real-time insight into how their numbers are actually trending between those fixed, widely spaced points.
This gap can be genuinely costly. A business that only reviews its finances once a year risks discovering a slow, steady decline in margin, or a creeping cash flow problem, only once it's already become serious enough to demand urgent action. By the time an annual set of accounts is prepared, several months of the relevant trading period have often already passed, which limits how much can realistically be done to correct course during the year it actually happened in.
Quarterly Contact as a Sensible Baseline
For most small and medium London businesses, quarterly contact represents a genuinely sensible baseline to aim for: a short review after each VAT quarter closes, or a periodic check-in tied naturally to management accounts. This cadence catches emerging issues early enough to act on them properly, without becoming an unnecessary drain on either your time or your accountant's. If your VAT return preparation never comes with any real commentary on what the underlying figures actually show about your business performance, you're missing an opportunity that quarterly contact should naturally provide as a matter of course.
Quarterly contact also fits neatly with how most small London businesses already think about their own performance, since it broadly mirrors the natural rhythm of VAT reporting already in place for many of them. Rather than adding an entirely separate layer of admin, a good firm folds genuine commentary into work that's already happening anyway, meaning you get real insight without needing to schedule additional meetings purely for the sake of it.
Monthly Contact for Growing or Complex Businesses
Businesses experiencing rapid growth, managing genuinely tighter cash flow, or operating within more complex structures typically benefit noticeably from monthly contact instead. This might include proper management accounts, a short call to discuss performance against budget, or regular updates on payroll costs and current cash position. At this frequency, communication starts to resemble genuine financial management support rather than simple periodic compliance, which is exactly the kind of relationship many London businesses actively seek when they move towards a more hands-on virtual finance director arrangement instead of relying on traditional once-a-year accounting alone.
Event-Driven Contact Matters Just as Much
Beyond any regular fixed schedule, good communication also responds naturally to events as they occur: a change in tax legislation relevant to your specific sector, an unusually large invoice that affects your VAT position unexpectedly, or a query from HMRC that genuinely needs a swift and considered response. This event-driven contact is arguably even more important than the scheduled kind, because it clearly shows your accountant is actively monitoring your affairs rather than simply working through a fixed calendar regardless of what's actually happening. If nothing ever prompts unscheduled contact from your firm, it may well be worth asking directly whether anyone is really watching your figures closely at all.
Consider, too, how your firm handles genuinely significant changes in the wider tax landscape. When a Budget announcement changes a threshold or a relief that affects small businesses, does your accountant send a short note explaining the practical implications for you specifically, or do you only find out by chance, perhaps from a client group or a passing news article? The former is a strong, reliable sign of genuine event-driven communication in practice.
It's also a useful test to apply retrospectively. Think back over the last twelve months and ask whether your accountant ever reached out unprompted about something genuinely relevant to your business, rather than waiting for you to raise it first. If the honest answer is no, that's a meaningful signal worth acting on, because event-driven contact is often the clearest evidence of a firm that's genuinely paying attention rather than simply working through a fixed annual checklist.
Signs You're Not Hearing Enough
There are several clear warning signs that your current communication frequency has become genuinely inadequate for your needs. You only ever hear from your accountant when a deadline is already imminent and unavoidable. You find out about a liability only after it's already due for payment. Questions you raise take more than several days to receive even a simple acknowledgement. Any one of these recurring patterns suggests the relationship has quietly drifted into reactive, minimal-effort territory, and it's genuinely worth raising this directly with your firm rather than simply assuming it's just how every accountancy relationship inevitably works.
- Annual-only contact: essentially a compliance service with minimal real insight
- Quarterly contact: a reasonable, workable baseline for most small businesses
- Monthly contact: better suited to growing or genuinely complex businesses
- Event-driven contact: a strong sign your firm is actively watching your numbers
Setting the Right Expectations Early On
The best way to avoid disappointment later is to agree communication frequency explicitly right when you start working with a new firm, rather than simply assuming it will happen naturally over time. Ask what a typical quarter of contact genuinely looks like for a business roughly similar in size and shape to yours. A firm offering direct access to a senior adviser should be able to answer this clearly and specifically, because it reflects exactly how their service is actually structured day to day, not just a vague promise made once during an initial sales conversation.
Putting this agreement in writing, even briefly within an onboarding email, gives both sides something concrete to refer back to later. If contact frequency ever slips below what was originally agreed, you have a clear, fair basis for raising it, rather than relying on memory or a general impression of how often things used to happen earlier in the relationship.
Matching Frequency to Your Own Real Needs
It's also worth being genuinely honest with yourself about how much contact you actually want and can realistically use. Some owners strongly prefer detailed monthly reviews of every figure, while others are perfectly happy with a lighter touch and simply want reassurance that nothing important has been missed. There's no single universally correct answer here, but the frequency should always be a deliberate, discussed choice, not something that simply happens by default because nobody ever raised the topic openly.
The Bottom Line
There's no single universal rule for exactly how often you should hear from your accountant, but genuine silence beyond statutory deadlines is rarely ever a good sign for your business. Quarterly contact is a reasonable baseline for most London small businesses, with monthly or event-driven communication reserved for those with greater underlying complexity. Agreeing this rhythm explicitly and early, rather than leaving it entirely to chance, is one of the simplest ways to get genuinely more value from the relationship over time.
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