Business Ideas in Romania

A business opportunity for accountants

• Posted by Steve on November 26th, 2006 filed in Services

Opportunity: Professional accounting services

**Note - This post relates to a number of opportunities to “professionalize” the services industry. While this post will be relevant mostly to accountants, the same concepts can be applied to almost any service industry. I will post more examples later…**

When I first set up the business in Romania, a colleague and I approached a big, international accountancy in Bucharest hoping for some specific advice to some very specific questions. We were willing to pay the necessary rates to get the concrete advice we needed.

What we received was a junior resource and a senior resource (in title only) who had no idea how to run an initial client meeting (my colleague ended up running it for them) followed by no response – either written or verbal – to our queries. My guess is that it was a combination of poor training and a lack of willingness to engage with anything but a large business with considerable budget to spend.

There is, however, a huge underserved market of small to medium-sized businesses that need professional accounting help. Currently, they usually turn to accountants operating as a sole proprietorship or a small firm that often does not have the capacity to have internal specialists and to stay abreast of the rapidly changing legislation. Often, if you ask five accountants… you’ll get six different answers to your question depending on their ability and their effort to stay updated (which – to be fair – is a difficult job).

There is a major opportunity to professionalize these accounting operations as there are many growing firms who do not yet require (or can afford the six figure budgets of) the services of the “Big Four” accountancies but still require advice to cope with the new fiscal legislation, VAT issues, etc. Building practices of multiple accountants will allow these firms to have a team of specialists and to spread the cost of needed training across the company.

A special advantage will go to those firms who develop the capability to deliver services remotely with collaboration software, video conferencing, and other tools to cut costs and widen their available customer base.