What should I be paying my accountant for this?

[ColinP]

What would all of you accountants out there feel is a fair charge for this:

1. Preparation of the company's statutory accounts for the year ended 31 March 2009

2. Preparation of corporation tax computaqtions and submitting the companies return

3. Prepartion of abbreviated accounts and filing them at Companies House

Bearing in mind that I had already collated all receipts and invoices and provided a detailed spreadsheet with everything correctly broken down. They turned the accounts around within a few days of paperwork being received.

[NicolaUK]

What did they charge you?

[ColinP]

A lot - more than double what I was expecting. I want to see if I was totally in the wrong ballpark before saying how much though.

[uk_mez]

I used to work for a small firm (in the Thames Valley) and do stuff like this - assuming straightforward accounts and no prolonged correspondence on information requests and getting stuff finalised, we'd have charged something like £1,000 - £1,200 for the accounts (full and abbreviated), plus the filing fee, and £600 for the CT prep and filing.

[Ono]

Why do you need full and abbreviated accounts? If you are doing full you can just file that instead.

Anyway, my Missus would probably charge you £1k for the lot.

[BigH]

it all depends on the quality of your records.

If they're pretty good (bank reconciles/etc), I'd estimate £ 500-£800 +vat for everything you list (would also include dealing with the odd query you might have throughout the year)

If you're using London firm, then you pays London prices - possibly double the above.

[Baz]

If you want the world knowing what your company makes the full accounts are fine. Not the best advice though. Abbreviated accounts take about an hour to prepare from the full accounts.

We had this same thread last year Colin and it turned out they were doing a lot more than you thought. Every client would get a different bill, you really need to ask what they are doing over the normal compliance work to justify the bill.

Just because you feel you are filing your records nice and neat doesn't mean they are in the best format for the accountant. I have clients come to me saying it should be easy this year as I have filed them in alphabetical order for you..... when In fact that takes twice as long for me to do what I needed.

Either change accountants, get some quotes or ask them how do I get my bill down.

I have a client and we do exactly what you list and we charge him £600, another small Co client I charge £2500 for the same work. Same end result for the client but second one has 32 HP agreements and changes 15 vehicles a year. If that was in London or a big city the fee could be doubled.

However assuming the records are fine, no extra work and no timely analysis is needed then £1000 would probably be in the correct ballpark. If the bill is £2000 then there must be something else, like the HP agreements example, or the Co valuation last year, to explain this. If there isn't ask to see a time analysis of the activity on your account. If they refuse then have a look at your engagement letter and follow through their complaint procedure. You can always lodge a complaint with the ICAEW or ACCA depending if they are chartered or certified.