When to hire
an accountant
for your business?

According to Manuel Fresnais, president of the translation firm Sematos, even the most confident entrepreneurs should work with a professional, such as an accountant or lawyer, as soon as they start up their business.

This article has been updated in November 2018.

After leaving the Canadian Armed Forces, Manuel started a B.A. in translation at Université Laval with the goal of taking over from his father, who was a self-employed translator. One thing led to another and he ended up opening his own translation firm.

“I felt fairly comfortable with numbers,” he said. “I started an entrepreneurial profile at university and I also took an accounting course.”

In the initial years of his firm, which only had a handful of translators, Manuel wanted to save money by taking care of the accounting for his business. However, he would have hired an accountant earlier if he had known how much he would benefit from it.

It pays to pay an accountant

Since he started working with an accountant, Manuel realizes that he overestimated his abilities and that, ironically, the best way to save would have been to add an expense to his budget.

“There is a difference between being good in accounting and being a professional accountant,” he said. “When I handled my own accounting, I didn’t necessarily think of following up on my margins and ratios. I would follow up on my financial statements, but I didn’t get an accurate picture of my situation.”

According to Manuel, entrepreneurs in the startup phase are often absorbed by daily challenges and the short term, whereas it’s easier for an accountant to see an overall picture of the business’s finances and suggest long-term solutions. It’s not just a question of specialized knowledge, he explains, but also a question of work environment.

However, specialized knowledge also plays an important role.

For example, there are many benefits to doing business with a tax accountant for your business’s income taxes. In addition to helping make better business decisions, the tax accountant can help you choose the right tools to prepare your income tax return.

“The translation field is a little like that,” he explained.

“A company can decide to have its texts translated by a bilingual employee in order to save money. But this decision is often motivated by a lack of knowledge of the subtleties of a language and the consequences that amateur translations could have. The same applies to accounting: If you aren’t a professional, you can’t know all of the subtleties of taxes and their consequences. In other words, when you don’t consult a professional, it’s often because you don’t know that you are unaware, and this type of dual unawareness often leads to downstream costs.”

How many advertising campaigns have failed due to a poor translation? Similarly, how many businesses have not exploited the full potential of their revenues by not outsourcing their accounting to a professional? Since he turned to Hamel Comptable , a member of the Ordre des CPA, Manuel believes that he avoids this type of downstream cost.

Discovering new assets

When Manuel incorporated his business, he did not perform a rollover since he believed that it wasn’t worth it with his few computers and chairs. However, by working with a professional, he learned that his possessions were not just material.

“I never thought that my translation memories could be considered assets,” he said.

A translation memory is a computer tool used by professional translators to save terms and segments of texts that have already been translated. Translators save time for themselves and their colleagues by not having to perform searches.

“One of Sematos’ translation memories contains approximately 750,000 entries, or more than seven million words. It’s hard to evaluate, but if this translation memory allows me to save an average of one cent per word, it’s worth a significant percentage of my revenues.”

The lawyer: the professional you should not forget

How do you add a translation memory to the company’s value without it becoming a taxable benefit? To be certain, Manuel had to consult a lawyer. Accounting and law are very close disciplines, he says. That’s why he believes that a lawyer should be consulted fairly early in the business startup process.

“You can create a business with the snap of your fingers. You go to the Enterprise Register, provide your information, pay the fee and it’s done: Your company is created from a government standpoint. However, the legal aspect is more complicated. For example, nobody will tell you that you must make a minute book. A lawyer will tell you that.”

Although he didn’t succeed his father as a self-employed translator, today Manuel is at the head of a translation firm that has about 15 translators. He recently started a second business, Premier Plan Photobooth, to which he can apply the lessons that he learned from his first entrepreneurial adventure, namely hiring an accountant.