£4,200 accountants bill

pizzaman_3

This was for our first year of partnership. All the receipts were entered into an excel document by ourselves and they just prepared the partnership accounts and filed our individual returns which were just standard as non of us had any income for anywhere else. Im not sure the going rate for accountants but this seemed quite steep

Riq

You'd be suprised.
I am an accountant, don't know much about the fees. But I know we don't come cheap.

If you had one of the partners doing your books you will pay handsomely for his time.

BrianM1975

It does seem like a lot of money but it depends what services you asked for.

I'm an accountant and when I send a prospective new client I give them a quote for year one explaining what is and isn't included so there can be no confusion.

angie_baby

I work full time doing accounts and am now on 25K thanks to a new payrise - and we have audited accounts too

ManAtHome

Does sound a lot - ours is a small limited company and we get the accounts and (3) tax returns for around 1/2 of that.You should ask for a breakdown of the charges, Riq and Brian may offer an opinion based on that.

dunstonh

Did you just dump a load of papers on the accountant to sort out or did you supply sorted and categorised data to them?

pizzaman_3

No everything was entered into an excel document we didnt give him any papers at all other than bank statements

dunstonh

Sounds very expensive for a partnership then. How many partners? I would guess around eight at that cost

Cook_County

I am confused. You have also posted a separate question alleging your partner(s) stole from both you & the partnership.

It is quite likely that you are paying the accountant for liasion with the police, your solicitors and drafting opening and closing accounts and figuring losses on dissolution of the partnership.

If we understood the story properly the readers of this forum could comment fairly.

Pennywise

pizzaman wrote: »

No everything was entered into an excel document we didnt give him any papers at all other than bank statements

Yes, but was it all entered correctly? Did everything tie up exactly with the bank statements? Did the closing balance on the bank statement agree exactly with the difference between "ins" and "outs" on your spreadsheet? Did you analyse all income and expenses into suitable columns on the spreadsheet? Did the spreadsheet include any private items? Did you provide proper lists of monies due from customers and due to suppliers at the year end? Did you provide a proper closing stock valuation? In two decades of preparing accounts from "hand made" spreadsheets, I have NEVER yet been given one that didn't contain errors. The trouble with spreadsheets is that everyone thinks they're right, but it is far too easy to make a mistake with a formula (even a simple @sum), put a number in a cell wrongly formatted as test instead of a number (so it doesn't get included in totals), or hide a row or column by accident (so it is still included in a total but not visible). If I had my way, spreadsheets would be banned. If a spreadsheet contains an error somewhere, it can literally take hours and hours to find it.

You don't say how many transactions there were, the type of business you operate, etc. If you only have 10 transactions per week, then the charge is way too high, but if you have hundreds of transactions, then the time costs can add up if the spreadsheet isn't in the right format or contains errors. You need to contact the accountant and ask for an itemised bill, then ask for explanations of anything that looks odd.

morgani

Another accountant here.

Have to agree with pennywise really.

It does possibly seem a lot but there are too many hidden factors to consider.

You may have grouped things together that do not go together like motor repairs and general repairs. Also was there a lot of movement of fixed assets on the balance sheet beings you had just set up.

Was there also alot of finance taken to fund the setting up of the partnership as these account would also need to be reconciled.

Did you also ask for any tax planning on how to go forward with the partnership or the partners personal tax affairs?

It also depends on how clear the spreadsheet was to someone else (we all know that what is sometimes clear to the author isn't alwaysto someone else).

As others have said ask for a breakdown of the bill and also possibly what level of staff worked on it to have a better idea of how realistic the charges are.

I would try all you can to rectify and agree the fees with the accountants but you could always take your complaint to the governing body if you feel they are still unfair but you may not get far on a fees dispute.

Post back when you have more info and we can all form a better opinion.