An efficient method of interpretation of the crystal field effect in nonmetallic $f$-electron systems, the enhanced angular overlap model (EAOM), is presented. The method is established on the ground of perturbation expansion of the effective Hamiltonian for localized electrons and first-principles calculations related to available experimental data. The series of actinide compounds $A{\mathrm{O}}_{2}$, oxychalcogenides $A\mathrm{O}X$, and dichalcogenides $\mathrm{U}{X}_{2}$ where $X=\mathrm{S}$,Se,Te and $A=\mathrm{U}$,Np serve as probes of the effectiveness of the proposed method. An idea is to enhance the usual angular overlap model with ab initio calculations of those contributions to the crystal field potential, which cannot be represented by the usual angular overlap model (AOM). The enhancement leads to an improved fitting and makes the approach intrinsically coherent. In addition, the ab initio calculations of the main, AOM-consistent part of the crystal field potential allows one to fix the material-specific relations for the EAOM parameters in the effective Hamiltonian. Consequently, the electronic structure interpretation based on EAOM can be extended to systems of the lowest point symmetries or/and deficient experimental data. Several examples illustrating the promising capabilities of EAOM are given.