Fee for LTD Co. A/cs

shadeofblue

Morning all,

Rencently new MIP. Got a potential client wanting LTD company accounts.
From phone conversation the director tells me there turnover for first year was around £45K. Accounts have been done monthly by outsourcing (i'm yet to see the quality of this).

The potencial client is a referral- been told the person is nice but one of those ones you may have to motivate. The director proves it by explaining to me they were late filing with Companies house and got a letter threating being struck off CH records!
Set a meeting with person to see accounts have a chat and access a fee.

I'm currently working out a fee and will decide upon seeing clients documents, but based on my brief description of client i'd be interested to hear what you would charge?


All advice is appreciated

Rachel

Monsoon

It really is contingent on the quality of their records. Also, what do they want from you? A basic compliance only service (cheaper) or proactive tax planning (more expensive)? Are you including director(s) tax return(s) and annual return in the fee, or is it just Accounts and CT600 filing? Is advice included free with the fee?

Be very clear what you want to offer for the price

For a filing-only service based on a decent TB with minimal errors, £500 is in the right ball park. I always make it clear that if the bookkeeping is not up to the agreed standard [and put this in the engagement lettter] we reserve the right to charge extra for putting it right, and will agree a fee up front for this before commencing work.

shadeofblue

thanks once again Monsoon for your advice xxx

Londina

Monsoon wrote: »

For a filing-only service based on a decent TB with minimal errors, £500 is in the right ball park.

£500 as a one off fee for the year accounts only? sounds good!

Wondering how those practices that charges £30 per month for bookkeeping including year end to Ltd companies make any money, example if you want to earn say £1500 per month, you do 3 year ends at £500 each and you are sorted, if you charge £30 per month you would need 50 clients at least...
Am I missing something?

wildgoose1uk

I have thought the same thing and look forward to the replies.......

Bluewednesday

Londina wrote: »

£500 as a one off fee for the year accounts only? sounds good!

Wondering how those practices that charges £30 per month for bookkeeping including year end to Ltd companies make any money, example if you want to earn say £1500 per month, you do 3 year ends at £500 each and you are sorted, if you charge £30 per month you would need 50 clients at least...
Am I missing something?

Accounts requires a different set of skills and experience to bookkeeping
Accounts and tax returns require software (that will be more necessary by April 2011)
Accounts and tax returns carries more risk when the involvement is just at year end.
Accounts on their own requires more investigation and checks than those where the accountants have done the bookkeeping.

Finding 3 year ends a month would be nice - however it tends to be 90% of your limited company clients have a March year end so come Jan - Mar you would be twiddling your thumbs!

We may charge £500 for a simple set of accounts and tax return but if we did the bookkeeping monthly the bill would be much higher than £30 a month! I presume others are the same?

Monsoon

Agree with Bluewednesday.

And £500 is on the cheap side, by the way, as its rare you get a perfect TB and the client literally only wants filing only, they will at least want salary+dividends advice and filing usually.

Bookkeeping is a totally different kettle of fish. 2 hours bk a month at £20 per hour is £40 a month which is £480 a year of bk alone.

Add in some technical advice, tax planning etc and you're looking at 4 figures a year easy.

It is getting harder to charge like this though; we opt for a monthly fee model but all of the above is more than 30 a month!!

Londina

Monsoon wrote: »

Bookkeeping is a totally different kettle of fish. 2 hours bk a month at £20 per hour is £40 a month which is £480 a year of bk alone.

So you are saying that you would charge to a company £480 a year for bk and £500 for the preparation of final accounts + tax return?

I'm sure some practices charge £30 per month with final accounts included, for me that is too cheap and wondering how would you survive with charges like that, you would need 100 clients to make a profit and then probably it wouldn't be enough, as bk for 100 clients is a lot and probably you have to hire another person!

I don't know, it's confusing

burg

With small businesses the year end procedures are often the case of basic cash book creation and then control accounts and journals etc for year end accounts. The cash book can often be done on a monthly basis with little additional work needed to be done to provide tax forecasts. This can help greatly with workloads.

I would be aiming to do a £500 set of accounts including all tax returns somewhere in the region of 7 - 12 hours so 2-3 a week if doing annually. With everyone having similar year ends this means problems with workloads around April - June. By doing this monthly you can spread this over the year and therefore increase the number of clients that can be managed.

My charges are based around transactions, VAT registration, Payroll requirements, the client themselves, what type of service(s) they want, the industry they are in, the volume of cash and degrees of risk amongst other things and are not just simply based on turnover.

£500 sounds reasonable enough depending on the work involved as pointed out by Jenni.

Londina

burg wrote: »

£500 sounds reasonable enough depending on the work involved as pointed out by Jenni.

So you have your usual monthly fees, but do you charge separately for the preparation of final accounts?

burg

No. My monthly fees are to include everything but I do basic bookkeeping (i.e. cash book only) and charge based on the transaction volumes and the rest as I posted above