Fair or unfair?

sabreone0

Hello all, keen for some advice please. Our current accountant seems to be charging us quite a lot of money - approximatley 3.5% of turnover. We have an annual turnover of approximately £150k.
The services our accountant currently assists us with are :
Corporation tax
Book keeping
(sales are minimal as generally there is only a single invoice per day)
(purchases are again minimal as our business is a garden services provider)
Quarterly online VAT return
PAYE for 2 directors only (all other staff are contractors)
We provide our receipts quarterly, with 3 PDF months worth of bank statements and a spreadsheet showing all invoices and cheques written for the quarterly period. So, just the receipts to enter onto Sage and reconcilation with the bank statements and VAT online filing for the day to day running. And end of year corporation tax as an annual requirement.
Please advise if the current fees that we are being charged for our accountancy are expensive or about right?
Many thanks for your help.

InsideInsurance

Are you actually being charged 3.5% or is that just what it is working out as? £5,250 does sound a lot for what you're doing but it also depends to some degree how much professional advice is included in there.

Our accountants provide:

PAYE for 2 directors
Corp tax & returns
VAT returns etc
Tax returns for 2 directors
Reconciling accounts
Contract reviews via 3rd party company
Acting as registered office

Spreadsheet provided quarterly with all data on it. Approximately 1 invoice and 12 expense items a week.

We pay £100 (net) per month for the service and our gross turnover is a little more than yours but it the accountants are officially much more on a book keep basis with minimal professional advice until year end (not that they dont answer quick questions via the phone)

Pennywise

Your problem is that you're getting an accountant to do the book-keeping. You should either do the book-keeping yourself or get a book-keeper. A book-keeper will charge from £10 to £30 per hour whilst your firm of accountants may be charging £30-£90 per hour for doing the same thing.

Book-keepers exist for a reason and would deal with the VAT and payroll. That would just leave the accountant for the year end and ad-hoc advice etc - you needn't be paying an accountant more than £1,000 or so for year end accounts and tax for a company your size. Probably a hundred pounds per month or so for a book-keeper (4-5 hours per month on average).

You could shop around accountants to see if you can find someone else who'll do as good a job at lower cost, but your main issue is the book-keeping and it's ridiculous to pay for an accountancy practice to do that because their hourly rate for book-keeping will be 2-3 times the amount you'd pay directly to a book-keeper.

paddyrg

Pennywise is spot-on - bookkeeping can easily be handled by a bookkeeper far cheaper than the accountant - even though the accountant probably subs the work out to a bookkeeper already and loves the profit.

Frankly at an invoice a day, and notional receipts, you could do your own VAT and expenses fairly easily if you chose to, taking that bill down to a grand or £2000 or so (if they still give some advice, registered address, annual personal returns and PAYE). Contract reviews, I'd have thought a lawyer would be more appropriate anyway?

nickj_2

my accountant charges me a fixed amount per month - £72 and that covers everything inc tax returns for me and mrs j , but i do book keeping myself

bris

You should be paying around £100 pm for this, you need to look elsewhere.