Pricing

What do Accountants DO?

To talk about pricing, it’s important to touch briefly on what kind of things accountants actually do ie. their Services.

You could probably put this in two categories, that being:

1. Compliance

2. Advisory

Compliance work is all the ongoing, peace-of-mind things that keep you on the right side of the law and your tax minimised. It includes things like annual tax returns, business activity statements (BAS), dealing with ASIC and the ATO on your behalf, and could even include things like help managing your bookkeeping and payroll. Pricing compliance work really comes down to your individual circumstances so see below to better understand What Affects a Price.

Advisory work is more like the “get ahead” projects that can help you better understand your business so that you can grow profits. This stuff is (generally) easier to price and there’s a section below explaining a bit more about Advisory Projects if this is the first time you’re hearing about them (lots of folks still think accountants just do tax returns).

When putting together a proposal, we price up the services you need and then commit to a fixed fee monthly plan. Our How We Work page has more detail on that.

What Affects a Price?

You could simplify this down to the time involved.

Some factors that come into pricing up your tax and compliance work are:

1. Your business structure - You may have specific rules to follow according to the type(s) of entities involved.
   

2. Sales Turnover - How much are you selling? This is a baseline indicator of transaction volume. A growing business will have a lot more complexity in Year 5 than in Year 1. This all needs review and that takes more time.
   

3. Employees - How many? How often is the payroll cycle? Is it predictable or changes every payrun (eg. casual staff)? Are there awards to consider? Has superannuation been paid on time and in full during the year?
   

4. Buying and Selling Assets - Commonly these are cars, but each time a motor vehicle is added or removed from the business, it will take time to calculate any gain/loss from sale. Businesses who trade vehicles often tend to have higher accounting costs to keep track of that.
   

5. Finance Loans - Similar to above, asset loans need to be kept track of accurately in your books so lots of these (or constantly changing them) adds time to completing your tax return.
   

6. Director Loans - We’re talking about when you’ve taken company money outside of payroll or dividends, or spent company money on personal things. These are called Director Loans and require careful management and paperwork to keep you from a worse case scenario of paying a high percentage of tax.
   

7. Employee Perks - Paying your staff (including yourself) in non-cash ways such as giving them personal use of a company car or paying for their wining and dining can expose your business to Fringe Benefits Tax (FBT). This requires a whole different tax return to be dealt with properly and keep your business out of the crosshairs of the ATO.
   

8. The State of Your Accounting File - All of the above aside, there’s more time and work involved in tidying up a Xero file with a lot of incorrect categorisations than for one that is relatively clean. This is where a great bookkeeper is worth their weight in gold.
   

9. How Responsive You Are - We’re a team and we need your help to work as efficiently as possible, complete your job quickly and keep prices down for you. Our clients that get back to us quickly and with the information we need to keep moving forward tend to have better pricing when compared to others that need a lot of chasing up. Once again, this simply comes down to time involved.

This list isn’t exhaustive but as you can see, every business is different and factors like these affect the amount of time involved to do the work.

We believe in pricing fairly so that we can resource appropriately. It’s what allows us to deliver you a great client experience.

Advisory Projects

These can be easier to price in a standardised way and include things like the below:

1. Tax Planning (to optimise your tax coming into 30 June)
   

2. Benchmarking Reports (for your industry)
   

3. Budgets (to have goals to track against each month)
   

4. Cashflow and Profit Improvement Meetings
   

5. Cashflow Projections (to forecast your bank account balance into the future)
   

6. Scenario Planning (understand if you can afford a new employee or loan BEFORE committing)
   

7. App Advisory Reports (recommendations on ways to save you time and money)
   

8. KPIs (to measure and motivate staff performance)
   

9. Charge-Out Rate calculations (tradies love this one)
   

10. CGT Calculations (forecast the likely tax debt relating to a future property sale)

Click through any of the links above to better understand what each service is about and how it can help you grow your wealth.

Bookkeeping

Bookkeeping - can you help me with that? Sure can, and probably should!

We offer in-house bookkeeping if you want the efficiency of it all under one roof, or happy to work with your bookkeeper or connect you to another great Xero Bookkeeper in our network.

DIY bookkeeping is fine but it’s a bit of a false economy. You’ll be spending time you don’t have when you could be making more money doing what you’re good at and outsourcing the bookwork to someone who does it much quicker, more accurately and keeps on top of changing rules to make sure you’re claiming everything you can.

Also, if your books need a lot of tidy-up at the end of the year, you’ll be paying more than you have to for your accountant to set things straight before they can prepare the tax return.

Pricing bookkeeping is again about the time involved, so some relevant factors include:

1. Number of monthly transactions through your bank account - more transactions take more time to review
   

2. Number of active bank accounts - more adds complexity
   

3. How often you’d like your bank reconciliations done (monthly/weekly/daily) - more frequently requires more attentiveness and time
   

4. Number and type of employees - hospitality, for example, commonly has lots of changing casual staff with all sorts of payrates and awards to consider. Payroll here is much more complex than an engineering firm with monthly payroll of the 6 full-time employees (who are paid the same amount every time).
   

5. Frequency of payroll - weekly is 4x more payruns to process than monthly.
   

6. Paying your Bills - This is commonly referred to as managing your Accounts Payable function but if you’d like us accessing your bank account and loading up supplier payments for your approval and payment, there is a time-cost.
   

7. Technology - Sometimes an app can save a lot of time on both your end and ours. It’s then up to you to consider whether the monthly subscription fee is worth paying in order to work more pleasantly and quickly on both your end and ours. This can save bookkeeping costs if we’re able to work more efficiently and quickly while asking you less questions to get the work done. The bonus is faster reports for you to make decisions with.
   

The best thing about keeping your bookkeeping up to date is that you’ll have the financial data to do things like scenario planning to make smart decisions and grow your profits.

Personal Tax

We’re specialists in business tax and profit growth, so really only prepare personal tax returns for business owners.

We have a fixed fee schedule when pricing personal tax returns.

There is:

1. A Base Tax Return Rate

2. An Additional Schedule charge

The second point would only come up if your tax affairs had extra complexity in the way of rental properties, sole trader contracting income, capital gain events (selling property, share trading), etc.

These kind of things typically require a separate schedule to report each and take more time, so that’s obviously reflected in the pricing.

Ready to Talk?

Our Intro Calls are about getting to know eachother to see if we’re a good fit to work together.

After booking a time, you’ll receive a short questionnaire to complete before our call. This allows us to understand your circumstances so that our time together can be meaningful and we can have a real conversation about your needs now and into the future.

Off the back of an Intro Call, we’re able to provide a tailored proposal and of course answer any questions you may have.