The honest answer is that it depends on four things, and any firm quoting you before they know all four is guessing.
Volume of subcontractors. Whether you need job level reporting. How clean your bookkeeping is. And whether you want compliance only or advice as well.
What actually drives the number
How many subcontractors you pay. This is the biggest single driver. Ten subbies a month is a different monthly job from two, and CIS has to be right every time.
Whether you want job level numbers. Job costing is real work. Somebody has to allocate costs correctly and talk to whoever is running the site about cost to complete. Firms that offer it charge for it, and firms that do not are cheaper for that reason.
The state of your records. If your bookkeeping is current and coded properly, the accountant’s job is smaller. If it is a bank feed nobody has touched in eight months, somebody has to fix that first.
Compliance or advice. Filing accounts and returns is one price. Someone who looks at the numbers and rings you about them is another.
Why hourly rates are a bad way to buy this
Most decent firms now quote a fixed monthly fee, and that is the right way round. You want your accountant answering the phone without a meter running, because the calls you do not make are the expensive ones.
If a firm quotes hourly, ask what a normal year comes to. If they cannot say, they do not know their own business well enough to help you run yours.
What is usually included, and what is usually extra
| Normally in a monthly fee | Often charged separately |
|---|---|
| Annual accounts and corporation tax | Historic bookkeeping catch-up |
| VAT returns | HMRC enquiries and investigations |
| Payroll for a set number of employees | Group restructuring |
| Monthly CIS returns | Extra companies |
| Director Self Assessment | One-off advisory projects |
Get the second column in writing before you sign. That is where quotes that looked similar stop being similar.
The cheapest quote is rarely the cheapest outcome
Not a sales line. Four things we find regularly on businesses that were paying a low fee:
- CIS suffered never reconciled against HMRC’s record, so some was never claimed
- Retention missing from the balance sheet entirely
- The 5% VAT rate missed on a conversion, so the job was quoted 15% too high
- No job level numbers, so the same underpriced work kept getting quoted
Any one of those usually costs more than a year of the fee difference.
What to ask for in a quote
- A fixed monthly figure, with what is in it listed
- What is explicitly not in it
- What happens to the fee if you take on more subcontractors
- When management accounts arrive after month end
- Whether calls and questions are included or billed
What we charge
We quote after a call, once we know the four things at the top of this page. We do not publish a price list because the honest number for a five subcontractor business and a forty subcontractor business are not close enough for a table to be useful.
What we will do is tell you on that call whether we are the right fit, and say so if we are not. See who we work with or book a call.