His old accountant was clinical. He wanted someone human.

A design consultancy owner I work with had been with the same accountant for over a decade before we met. She was perfectly competent, but as he described her, always very clinical. She didn't want to get involved in the business and never really felt like she had the time for it.

When we started working together his business was the subsidiary of a large international company, with a parent on the other side of the world that gave the finance side almost no attention. The hard part wasn't the bookkeeping, it was putting checks and balances around the big decisions he was making largely on his own, and making sure the information flowing back and forth was sound. When he later set up his own design business, he brought me with him.

What he values most is that I treat his business as if part of it were mine, and that I'm interested. He talks about me as part of the team rather than someone who does some of the accounts once a month, and he sees what I do as preventative rather than something he calls when it's already gone wrong.