It’s a familiar story in small business circles: the numbers go sideways, the ATO calls, cash runs out, and suddenly the conversation becomes accusatory. “My accountant never told me.” “They should have prevented this.” “Why didn’t they do more?”
And yet, behind the blame is a truth many business owners don’t want to hear: accounting advice doesn’t work if it never turns into action, and action is shared responsibility. The best accountants don’t just lodge tax returns—they help business owners understand what the numbers mean, agree on expectations, and build systems so problems are spotted early instead of discovered at liquidation.
This webinar Amanda Gascoigne, Founder & Director of Amanda Gascoigne Consulting and creator of the Better Practice, Better Life program, joined Jarvis Archer of Business Reset to unpack why the blame cycle is so widespread in Australia, what the data shows about common causes of business failure, and—most importantly—how accountants and business owners can rebuild trust through clearer scope, better communication, and more practical advisory work.
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The Data Behind Business Failure: It’s Often Cash Flow, Losses, and Debt
Blame can feel personal, but business outcomes are rarely about one person. They’re about patterns: low cash buffers, trading losses, mounting tax and super liabilities, and complexity that makes decision-making harder.
According to ASIC data drawn from liquidation reports (via liquidation causes), the highest-risk industries include construction, accommodation/hospitality, and retail. Across these categories, a top driver is “inadequate cash flow / high cash use.” In practical terms, that often means businesses can’t pay debts as they fall due—an insolvency test that can be as simple as missing cash timing even when the business “feels” like it’s trading.
Other common failure contributors include trading losses and increased costs and debt servicing pressure, particularly after government stimulus and rapid financing periods.
The financial pressure is visible in tax debt trends too. In FY24–FY25, small business ATO debt stayed roughly flat at about $35–$36 billion, but it was double pre-COVID levels (around $17 billion). More recently, during FY25–FY26, debt increased by roughly $3 billion, with major components including:
Income tax: about $7.1 billion (with some reduction in the latest period suggesting profitability challenges)
Superannuation: around $2 billion
GST/BAS: about $28 billion, increasing by roughly $4 billion in the last year
Those figures don’t blame accountants. They show the environment business owners are operating in—and why early, frequent conversations about cash, margins, and obligations matter.
Why “My Accountant Never Told Me” Happens So Often
If you ask accountants why this happens, a pattern emerges. In informal polls among accounting professionals, the most common reasons business owners experience failures that lead to accusation are:
The client doesn’t listen (even when told)
The client doesn’t want to pay for advice (even when they need it)
The client doesn’t understand basic business requirements
Business complexity overwhelms decision-making
Clients don’t understand the limitations of what the accountant can do
In one conversation, a practitioner captured the core issue in a blunt way: a business owner had been advised to restructure from sole trader to company, then responded, “You handle everything and I’ll just code the Xero.” That kind of expectation isn’t just unrealistic—it removes the owner from the shared responsibility loop.
A helpful way to frame this is: accountants can diagnose and advise, but they can’t live the business decisions for the owner. If advisory insight isn’t translated into wages, budgets, cash-flow actions, and compliance behaviours, then the owner may only hear the warning after it’s too late.
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The Unrealistic Expectation Trap: “You Must Do Everything”
Many blame the accountant because they confuse compliance with control.
An accountant lodges, interprets, explains, and documents. But business owners still control the operational levers: spending, pricing, staffing, inventory, cash timing, and whether they actually follow advice. When clients expect “accounting” to mean “accounting responsibility,” they often treat fees like an entitlement to outcome rather than a service for guidance.
As one experienced adviser put it in the discussion: accountants are not a third party standing outside the business—they’re “an integral part of your team. This is shared dual responsibility.”
That “shared responsibility” concept becomes critical when things go wrong. Otherwise, the moment a problem surfaces, the client can reinterpret the past as neglect—rather than the real story, which is often missed communication, delayed action, and incomplete understanding.
Three Relationship Types: Balanced, Over-Delivered, and Under-Served
One of the strongest insights from the discussion is that many accounting failures aren’t technical—they’re relational.
1) Balanced: Compliance + Advice + Cash in the Bank
In a healthy relationship, business owners can feel the benefit immediately: stress reduces because cash and obligations are managed. The account isn’t just reactive; it’s proactive.
2) Over-Delivered (But Misaligned): Too Much Tax Work, Not Enough Business Value
This is when accountants do extensive work—sometimes even more than their engagement scope includes—but the business model still doesn’t improve. The client stays busy, but profitability and planning don’t improve because the advisory component isn’t institutionalised.
3) Under-Served: The Client Can’t Reach Them (or Doesn’t Get Guidance Early)
This is where accusations explode. One scenario highlighted in the conversation was a business owner with a serious ATO debt who couldn’t get timely responses. Rather than being helped through early warning indicators, the relationship deteriorated. In some cases, owners then switch advisers—sometimes to a turnaround specialist, coach, or even a liquidator.
When the relationship is “under-served,” the owner often experiences the accountant as an after-the-fact witness rather than a partner.
Watch the webinar, get the CPD, access the resources
The Real Fix: Reset Expectations with Every New Client
If you want fewer “you never told me” moments, you need a structure that makes expectations unambiguous.
A practical approach is to treat engagement scope and behavioural expectations like part of the product—not hidden in jargon. This can be done through:
Engagement letter clarity: What’s included versus excluded
Owner obligations: What the client must provide, by when, and what “timely” really means
Communication rules: Frequency, response windows, and which issues go to which channel
Documented advisory conversations: Including warnings and agreed actions
In the discussion, Amanda shared a boundary-setting method that reduced chaos in onboarding new clients in her firm. The practice refused new clients unless two conditions were met before taking them on:
The client was either using, or be willing to use, accounting software, and
The client was up to date with lodgements/ATO obligations
This isn’t about being difficult—it’s about preventing the relationship from starting already broken.
Stop “Tax-Only” Advice: Shift Toward Holistic Business Advisory
A major driver of blame is that business owners think the accountant’s job is primarily to “save tax.” Tax work matters, but tax-only advice can fail if the business doesn’t survive cash-flow timing, margin erosion, and operational reality.
One practitioner described a valuable reframe from a client who said: “I don’t care about paying tax. If I’m paying tax, it means I’ve got a good business.”
That mindset doesn’t mean tax isn’t important—it means the business owner understands that tax is a consequence of profitability, and profitability is built through systems, pricing, wages, and cash-flow discipline.
So what should “advisory” actually look like?
Here’s one definition:
Practical Advisory = Recurring Decisions Based on Numbers
Advisory is any structured conversation and planning that helps a business make decisions such as:
budgets and cash-flow planning
pricing/margin targets
break-even analysis
KPI tracking (e.g. cost to open the doors each day)
wage strategy and owner cash planning
early warning indicators (ATO debt trajectory, profit trend, cash utilisation)
Many business owners don’t need “more complexity.” They need simple visibility.
Example: The “Budget-Without-a-Wage” Problem
One of the most actionable points raised is that business owners often don’t know how much cash they truly need personally. When that’s missing, wages and drawings become guesswork.
A key recommendation shared was to separate business money and personal money by setting a regular wage (where possible) and taking that through payroll, just like a standard employee. When owners withdraw inconsistent amounts of cash or treat ATO liabilities as something that can be rearranged later, the business can quietly drift toward insolvency.
A blunt way to say it: you can’t manage what you can’t measure, and you can’t fix cash flow without knowing how much cash your lifestyle and obligations require.
Watch the webinar, get the CPD, access the resources
How to Prevent the Blame Cycle: Have the Conversation Early, and Document It
Accountants sometimes avoid sensitive discussions because they think it’s restricted or too risky. But the real constraint is usually capacity and timing, not legal barriers.
Early conversations don’t have to be dramatic. They can be framed as:
“Here are the indicators we can see”
“Here’s what it could mean”
“Here’s what we recommend you do next”
“Are you willing to take action? If not, what’s your alternative plan?”
Crucially, document it—so if the owner later claims “I never heard,” you can point to documented warnings, meeting notes, and agreed next steps.
Here’s a simple checklist for “tell them early” advisory conversations:
Show the trend: profit, cash movement, debt, and margin
Explain what changed (and why it matters)
Identify the next 30–90 day action
Agree on owner responsibility and timelines
Record the conversation and outcomes
Value Yourself: Price Scope for Advisory Work, Not Just Deadlines
Another reason accountants get blamed is that their time becomes commoditised. If advisory isn’t priced and resourced, it disappears under compliance workloads.
Amanda and Jarvis discussed that many practices under-deliver advisory because they’re trapped in old models: annual meetings, tax-only scope, and “best effort” communication that becomes impossible once complexity grows.
The antidote is commercial and operational:
raise fees to fund the work actually required
clearly scope advisory components
charge for capacity where service level increases
use leverage (resources, newsletters, recorded explainers) so knowledge is delivered consistently
Amanda shared this tip: send clients a monthly or quarterly newsletter that updates clients on what matters, because accountants can’t call everyone personally before each threshold change. This reduces the likelihood of “you never told me” because the information is delivered in advance.
The Bottom Line: No One Wins by Blaming—But Everyone Can Win by Rebuilding
Business failure isn’t an accountant’s sole responsibility. But the blame cycle grows when expectations are unclear, communication is reactive, and advisory doesn’t translate into action.
A balanced relationship reduces stress because it creates three things:
Shared clarity about what the accountant does and what the owner must do
Early visibility into problems before they become insolvency events
Practical planning that turns numbers into decisions
As Jarvis’ closing reflection put it: if you don’t provide advice, someone else will—often at a much higher cost and with far less responsibility for outcomes.
If you’re an accountant, the next step is not just “do better.” It’s to redesign how you scope, communicate, and document advisory. If you’re a business owner, the next step is not just “get a new accountant.” It’s to start treating advice as something you act on—because that’s where survival and growth are built.
When the numbers improve, the blame disappears. And more importantly: so does the stress.
