accountancy costs

00ec25

in keeping with the theme of this thread - how much would you expect to pay for accountancy costs for a (vehicle enthusiasts) club which:
a) has t/o of approx £55k pa
b) sells vehicle spare parts to fully paid up members only
c) sells club merchandise to fully paid up members
d) is NOT a registered charity and does NOT have gift aid on its annual subscriptions
e) is UK based and is VAT registered, submits three x quarterly estimates and then the annual detailed return

currently we are charged £1000 for book keeping and £1250 for (annual) accounts preparation
seems a bit steep to me.....?
can anyone recommend a cheaper alternative?????

pjclar02

Hello there

It does depend slightly on the manner in which you are maintaining records, and providing them to your accountant and how many transactions are going through each quarter.

If there are minimal transactions, then we would probably charge £100-£150 per quarter for the book-keeping and VAT returns, and then maybe £600-£700 for the year end so maybe £1,200 in total for the year.

If you are only generating turnover of £55k, then paying over 4% of turnover seems pretty steep. The best suggestion I can make is to try and take workload away from the acountant. Maintain your records yourselves in a good Excel spreadsheet and then send to the accountant so that you have done the majority of the legwork and then hopefully they can reduce their fees a little.

Hope this helps.

chrismac1

I'd say £1,000 to £1,200 is the right ball park, main assumption is that you're not registered as an Industrial and Provident Society or any other body requiring an audit. I'd recommend getting quotes from other local accountants, ideally fixed price ones. Then armed with these you can ask your existing accountant to chop the fee down. Local businesses quite often ring me for quotes and then do that, I'm fine with it and anyway the competitors usually try sneaky charges so they switch anyway. But they almost always either match the quote or move to somewhere near it, after all there is a recession on and plenty of practices are winding up.

00ec25

thanks guys
I too thought it was a rip off - the treasurer uses his "local" accountant (everything is done by mail so location is irrelevant) but i think he saw us coming and charges accordingly - the a/cs prep charge increased by £250 this year despite our t/o being down 25%.

I will see what I can do to get the club to shop around, I do not know the exact details or transaction count, but the treasurer does not keep any records at all and simply sends a brown paper parcel of receipts/invoices to the accountant each quarter, I'd agree therefore that keeping our own records should be a start point for negotiating downwards.
BTW - the club status is company limited by guarantee and gets the small co audit exemption

TM1976

00ec25 wrote: »

thanks guys
I too thought it was a rip off - the treasurer uses his "local" accountant (everything is done by mail so location is irrelevant) but i think he saw us coming and charges accordingly - the a/cs prep charge increased by £250 this year despite our t/o being down 25%.

I will see what I can do to get the club to shop around, I do not know the exact details or transaction count, but the treasurer does not keep any records at all and simply sends a brown paper parcel of receipts/invoices to the accountant each quarter, I'd agree therefore that keeping our own records should be a start point for negotiating downwards.
BTW - the club status is company limited by guarantee and gets the small co audit exemption

I think I agree with the other posters here, basically anything under £1,000 is cheap for a Ltd co. Difficult to say without seeing the full detail but if you only send a bag of receipts I think you'd easily be looking at £2k plus in total. If the bookkeeping is easy you could probably get it done cheaper on it's own - depending on the number of transactions.

Overall my opinon is the rate is not a rip off, probably about normal.