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Client Relationships
By Sherri F. Mahoney-Battles, EA
When we prepare income taxes for a client they share highly sensitive financial information. A client that trusts their tax preparer will share this information easily and will take advantage of the relationship during the year by calling or emailing with questions regarding their tax and financial situation.
As a result of the relationship we build, clients will often contact me when they are trying to make difficult decisions. Should they sell the house, keep the house, rent the house, buy a car, lease a car, make the purchase, pay off the debt, leave the job, buy/sell the business, move to another state, divorce the spouse, loan the money? The list goes on and on. They want answers to these questions based on the tax and financial implications, and I enjoy working through this process with them. The beauty of working with numbers is that they never lie. We can usually determine with relative ease whether there is a financial benefit to the question they are posing. Then the hard work begins, because even though the numbers might point us in one direction there can be other, less concrete, circumstances pulling us in an entirely different direction.
Clients are often in turmoil when their emotions conflict with what appears to be a sound financial resolution. The answer, though hard to see, is usually right before our eyes. There is more than one piece to the cost benefit analysis. A decision should not be made based solely on the financial merits nor should it be made based solely on the emotional merits. In order to reach a decision that affects you both financially and emotionally you must be willing to examine it from all angles. The better we get to know our clients the more qualified we become at helping them wade through the issues that factor into the decisions they make.
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