Accountant's Charge Per Hour?

[BeccaOnline]

Hi Guys,

Sorry if this has been asked before (I've had a look and can only see queries about invoice totals), however what is the 'average' charge per hour for an accountant?

Ours charges £125 per hour, but we have no way of knowing whether this is cheap, expensive, or the going rate!

Thanks

[CassioAcc]

You would be best to get fixed prices from your accountant. At that hourly rate you could be landed with some large bills.

[jholden]

£125 per hour for a qualified accountant is not high. However, the work on your affairs will be dealt with by various staff members on lower rates.

If your accountant is the only person doing the work then at £125 per hour for everything he does this will work out expensive.

As already said get a fixed price quote, then the hourly rate doesn't matter if you are happy with the fee.

Jason

[Fernhurst Solutions Ltd]

Hiya Becca

As with anything prices vary between both ends of the scale. If you are happy with your Accountant fine, however I would arrange a meeting with a few different Accountant's in your local area to get a better feel of your area 'average'.

As has been mention on numerous occasions, if you are comfortable and they are advising you well, then £125 p/h could well be a good investment.

Good Luck

:)

[Philip Hoyle]

£125 ph is relatively cheap for tax planning and business planning advice - i.e. where an hour or two of time can save you hundreds if not thousands of pounds. Some firms will charge you twice that amount for the planning work.

Conversely, it is a ridiculously high price to pay for them to do the basics like book-keeping, VAT and payroll, where you could easily find yourself a book-keeper for say £20 per hour.

If you are doing the basics in house and only need the accountant for advice and planning, then I don't think the cost is unreasonable, although I am sure you could find cheaper.

If they are a "one man band", it won't necessarily make them more expensive than a firm with lots of staff at different levels. If the accountant himself is doing everything (like I do in my practice), the total time spent is a lot less as there is no training/supervision/review of the various levels of staff.

For example, a typical town centre firm may do a set of year end accounts, tax return and meeting as follows - junior time 5 hours at £25 (£125), senior time 2 hours at £50 (£100), tax senior time 1 hour at £50 (£50), partner time 1/2 hour review, and 1 hour meeting, at £150 (£225). So total time spent is 9 1/2 hours at a total fee of £500. Compare that with the "one man" band who would probably only spend a total of 5 hours in total at say £90 per hour gives a fee of £450. This is exactly how I operate my own practice - because I do it all myself, the total time per job is about half the time as there is no need for reviews, corrections, etc and of course, as I've been doing the job for 25 years, I'm a lot quicker and have learned what corners can legitimately be cut to still end up with the "right" results whereas staff with less experience can easily spend hours searching for irrelevances.

I'd echo what others have said, get quotes based "per job" rather than "per hour". Also make sure you know exactly what is covered and what extras there may be. Finally, make sure you do as much as possible yourself, i.e. proper book-keeping, vat and payroll - if you can't do these yourself get yourself a book-keeper. You want your accountant to spend quality time on getting your tax bill as low as possible and making as much profit as possible - you don't want them wasting time trying to balance your bank account for you!

[taxattack]

Excellent post, Philip.

[accountancyextra]

Great post Phillip:D

[Estimator]

Great post/ excellent post, :D Your fellow accountants like to hear you ramping up the fees Phillip!
Why stop at £90 - after all you are saving us all a fortune! ;)

[deniser]

We pay £750 + VAT for the work set out in Philip's post but we get so much good advice thrown in that I am more than happy. And we don't get charged extra if we ring up a couple of times during the year with questions.