How to change accountants without losing your records
You are allowed to leave. It surprises people how much guilt attaches to changing accountants, as if a decade of January emails created an obligation. It did not, and the process is more mechanical than the relationship: four steps, a few signatures, and the profession’s own etiquette does most of the work. Your records are yours, and no accountant can hold your tax history hostage because you found someone better suited to what you now need.
Here is the whole process, including the one situation where a handover genuinely stalls.
The four steps
Choose the new firm first. Leave nothing gapless, especially mid-year. Whatever prompted the move, a specialism your current firm lacks, responsiveness, fees, have the destination signed up before you say anything to the incumbent. Check the new firm is registered for anti-money laundering supervision, every legitimate practice is, it is a legal requirement for accountancy providers, and asking is a thirty second filter against the cowboys.
Tell your current accountant. An email is enough. Thank them, say you are moving, name the new firm, and give permission for them to hand over information. That permission sentence matters, confidentiality means your old accountant needs it before they can talk to anyone about your affairs.
Let the firms talk. The new firm writes what is called a professional clearance letter, asking whether there is any reason they should not act, and requesting the handover pack, returns, computations, carried-forward figures. Well-run firms complete this exchange inside a couple of weeks without you doing anything.
Re-point the authority with HMRC. Your new accountant needs to be authorised as your agent, through the digital handshake or the 64-8 authorisation, so they can see your record and deal with HMRC for you. The old authority gets removed at the same time. None of this notifies HMRC of anything meaningful about you, agents change constantly and it flags nothing.
What they can and cannot withhold
Your documents, the things you gave them and the returns filed on your behalf, are yours. What a firm can do, where fees are genuinely unpaid, is exercise a lien over some of its own working papers until the bill is settled. In practice this is the only lever that ever slows a handover, so if there is an outstanding invoice, settle or dispute it head-on rather than letting it sulk in the background for a month of stalled clearance. What they cannot do is charge you an exit fee for leaving, or drag the handover to punish you, professional bodies take a dim view and firms know it.
Timing, and what it costs
The move itself usually costs nothing. Most firms, ours included, treat onboarding and clearance as part of winning the work. The real cost dimension is timing: switch in October and everything is calm, switch on 20 January and your new firm is filing a return built on numbers it has never seen. If a deadline is close, it can still be done, but tell the new firm everything up front and expect the first year to involve more checking than usual.
There is a strong argument the checking is the point. A new firm looks at your carried-forward figures with fresh eyes, and that is when unclaimed losses, missed reliefs and long-unquestioned cost bases surface. We wrote about losses expiring unclaimed, and switch-time is when they most often get found, because it is the one moment someone reads the old files from the beginning.
What accountants charge, since you will ask
Fees follow complexity rather than a menu. A single-employment return with some bank interest sits at one end. A return carrying capital gains computations, rental accounts or a crypto history sits meaningfully higher, because the work is in building defensible numbers rather than typing them into boxes. What you should expect from any decent firm is a written fixed quote before work starts, and suspicion is the right response to both ends of the spectrum, the too-cheap and the unexplained-expensive. If the reason you are moving is that your current firm cannot handle crypto, that is, candidly, the gap we exist to fill.
Switching questions
Can my old accountant refuse to hand over my records?
Your own records and filed returns, no. A lien over their working papers is possible where fees are unpaid, which is why settling the final bill is step zero of a clean exit.
Will changing accountants look suspicious to HMRC?
No. Agent changes are routine administrative events. HMRC neither knows nor cares why you moved.
When is the best time to switch?
Just after a filing cycle ends, spring and summer for Self Assessment clients. Deadline-adjacent switches work but compress the checking that makes a switch valuable.
Do I have to tell my old accountant why?
No. A courteous sentence is plenty. The clearance letter process needs your permission, not your reasons.
If the move you are considering is toward specialist crypto help, our free review is the no-commitment way to see what fresh eyes find in your current position before you decide anything.
