An accounting practice is judged on a document few of its clients read in full. Yet the balance sheet comes last. Before it there are creased invoices, handwritten receipts, bank statements, payslips, and above all missing documents. The trade consists of turning that uneven material into accounts that hold, then explaining to the person in charge what they say about the business.
What an accounting practice actually sells
The client is the person who orders and pays: a shopkeeper, the head of a small company, an association treasurer, a sole practitioner. What they buy is almost never "figures". They buy books kept up to date, statements drawn up under an identifiable framework, deadlines met, and the ability to justify what was declared on the day someone asks.
The engagement begins with a conversation, and that conversation is about measurable facts: what activity, how many documents a month, how many bank accounts, how many employees, which software if any, and above all how far behind. A practice that quotes a fee without asking these questions is quoting for something other than the actual work.
From those answers comes a written proposal: the scope of the engagement, what falls outside it, how often the work is done, and what is expected from the client. That last part matters as much as the rest, because bookkeeping is work done by two.
The first task is asking for paperwork
A practice can only record what reaches it. Collection is therefore not a formality preceding the work: it is the first task, and often the most thankless. A delivery date has to be agreed, an accepted format settled — original, copy, legible photograph, account export — and then chased.
A transaction without a document is not a transaction that does not exist: it is an unjustified one, and the distinction changes everything. It will be recorded if it appears on a statement, but it stays flagged as such until the supporting document arrives or its absence is explained.
The professional reflex here comes down to three moves: ask, record the request, and leave the gap visible. A practice does not reconstruct a lost invoice, does not write a receipt in a third party's place and does not replace a missing document with a convenient entry. What those three prohibitions protect is not only regularity: it is the value of the whole file, since a single fabricated document makes every other one suspect.
From filing to entry, where reliability is decided
Documents are then filed by nature and by period, and recorded. This is where the accounting framework comes in — the rules under which a transaction becomes an entry.
That framework is not the same everywhere. In the states party to OHADA, the uniform act on accounting law and financial reporting sets a common frame. But OHADA covers some African countries, not the continent: elsewhere, a practice applies the framework in force in its own country. There is no universal chart of accounts, and no presentation of financial statements valid everywhere.
What is constant is the discipline: every entry points back to an identifiable, dated, retrievable document. A set of accounts is checked by walking that path backwards, and that is exactly what anyone who comes to verify it will do.
Reconciliation, or the books held against reality
Then comes bank reconciliation: comparing what the books say with what the statements say. The gaps it reveals are almost always instructive. A receipt recorded in the wrong period, charges never entered, a duplicated entry, a personal expense run through the business account, a payment whose origin nobody can recall.
The variety of payment methods complicates the exercise without changing it. Cash, transfer, card, digital wallet: each channel leaves a different kind of trace, more or less immediate, and reconciliation has to accommodate that unevenness rather than flatten it.
Handling an anomaly follows a simple rule: you document it, you do not smooth it over. In an organised practice, the person who enters is not the person who checks, and an unexplained gap goes up to whoever is responsible for the file rather than disappearing into an adjusting entry.
The closing: statements, and someone to explain them
Closing means justifying balances, passing year-end entries, checking that the whole thing is coherent, then drawing up the financial statements. The practice produces documents that each have a distinct use: the trial balance and the general ledger serve internal control, the journals serve traceability, the financial statements serve communication with the outside world.
That leaves the step many practices skip: the debrief. A document the owner does not understand is only good for filing away. Explaining it in plain language — where the result comes from, what has changed since last year, which lines call for a decision — turns an obligation into a management tool. It is probably where one practice differs most visibly from another.
Payroll and social declarations, a calendar that is not negotiable
Where the client employs people, the practice prepares payslips, calculates contributions and drafts the declarations. The International Labour Organization notes that social protection covers risks met across the life cycle and is financed in part by contributions levied on wages.
The branches covered, the competent bodies and the calculation rules differ from country to country: the practice applies the scheme of the place where the employer is established, and has nothing to transpose from one country to another. What does transpose is the calendar constraint, because a social declaration is filed on a date that is not open to negotiation.
The accountant is nonetheless not the employer. They calculate, they warn, they document; they do not settle a dispute, do not draft an employment contract in a lawyer's place and do not decide on a dismissal.
What the practice keeps, protects and tells no one
A practice holds information that could be used against its clients: turnover, margins, individual salaries, bank details, cash difficulties. Confidentiality there is not a commercial posture but a condition of practice.
In concrete terms: access limited to the staff handling the file, personal rather than shared credentials, regular and tested backups, retention of documents for the periods set by the applicable framework, disclosure to third parties only where those third parties are entitled to receive it. Bank details and credentials are not passed along in an ordinary conversation, and a transfer request received by message is verified through another channel before being carried out.
Software and artificial intelligence: what they do not carry
Automatic bank feeds, optical reading of invoices and artificial intelligence tools save real time: sorting documents, spotting the ones that are missing, drafting a summary, finding a paper in a bulky file.
None of those tools carries responsibility for the result. Automatic reading gets an amount, a date or a direction wrong; automatic filing depends on the quality of what it was given; a model produces a plausible sentence without knowing whether it is accurate. Human checking is not an optional precaution, it is what separates a set of accounts from a well-presented pile of assumptions. And no tool creates, removes or interprets a legal obligation in a professional's place.
In the African context
There is no single African accounting framework. In the states party to OHADA, a common set of rules applies; elsewhere on the continent, other rules apply, with their own statement formats and their own deadlines. A practice works within the law of one country, never that of a whole region.
Part of the clientele arrives with a partially documented activity. The International Labour Organization describes the weight of informal employment in many economies: for a practice, that translates very concretely into a first job of separating personal from business flows, then putting receipts and invoices in place where there were none.
The World Bank also points out that small and medium enterprises account for a major share of employment and face a gap in access to finance. Kept accounts make a file presentable; they do not guarantee a loan, a contract or a partner, and saying so honestly is better than turning it into a sales argument.
Then there are the material conditions, which vary by area far more than by country: internet access, the cost of services, distances, working languages, payment habits. Depending on the case, documents will be handed over physically, photographed or both, and a serious practice organises collection around what exists at the client's premises rather than around the tool it happens to prefer.
What an accounting practice does not promise
It does not promise to remove a tax, nor to guarantee that no audit will occur. It does not certify what it has not seen. It replaces neither the tax adviser, who diagnoses, regularises and assists during an audit, nor the lawyer, nor the statutory audit where one is required.
Nor does it announce a fee valid for everyone: the price of an engagement depends on the volume of documents, the number of employees, how often the work is done, the state of the file at the outset and the level of support wanted. Two businesses with the same turnover can require workloads that bear no relation to each other.
What a practice can promise is more modest and more useful: that every figure handed over points back to a document, that deadlines are known in advance, and that the owner leaves having understood what they have just signed.