The client questions accountants hear most — and where to send each one

Every accountant hears the same greatest hits. Salary or dividends this year? — squarely yours. Then the drift begins. How much should I be putting into my pension? I've got three old pensions — should I combine them? The business is sitting on £180,000 of cash; what should I do with it? Do I need a will now the company's worth something? Is my mortgage rate still competitive? Clients ask you because you are the professional they already trust with money, and because the questions genuinely feel adjacent to tax. Some are. Most are not. The pattern is worth noticing: the questions cluster around life events — a good year, a sale, a divorce, a death in the family — which means they arrive with urgency attached, at exactly the moment a vague answer does the most damage.

Explaining how pension tax relief works is tax knowledge — fine. Recommending that a client transfer, consolidate or invest is regulated financial advice, and giving it without FCA authorisation is both a legal problem and, more practically, a gap your professional indemnity insurance will not cover. The same boundary runs through investments, drawdown decisions and protection products. Wills and estate structuring sit outside the regulated perimeter but firmly inside specialist territory: an accountant who sketches a trust structure on a whiteboard owns the consequences. The safe formulation is factual, then a handover: here's how the relief works; whether and how much to contribute is one for a regulated adviser — I can introduce you. Clients rarely resent the boundary. They resent discovering, years later, that nobody qualified ever looked at the question.

A simple routing table covers almost everything. Pension contributions, consolidation, investments, drawdown, protection: a regulated financial adviser — checkable in minutes on the FCA Register. Wills, lasting powers of attorney, trusts, estate structuring for that newly valuable company: a will specialist or estate planner, ideally one comfortable with business assets and the 2026 business relief changes. Mortgages and remortgages: an adviser holding mortgage permissions. Anything that smells wrong — the client's guaranteed 12% bond — gets pointed at the FCA warning list and Action Fraud before it gets anything else. The refinement that separates a good referral from a name on a Post-it: match the specialist to the case. A director extracting £2 million from a sale needs a different adviser profile than an employee with a workplace pension question.

You should probably see someone is not a referral; it is a shrug with extra words. A real referral names a vetted specialist, explains why them, makes the introduction, and — where any commercial arrangement exists — discloses it to the client in writing, which professional body codes generally require anyway. Done properly, referrals compound: the client's problem actually gets solved, your file shows you flagged the issue and routed it, and specialists send work back. Some firms formalise this with a referral register; platforms such as SmartPeer track referrals end-to-end and generate the client disclosure letters automatically. Either way, the discipline is the point. The accountant who routes well becomes the hub every client checks with first — which is a considerably better business position than being the person who once said that's not really my area and changed the subject.