Do I detect a slight dislike or possibly fear of accountants ? Help is available here :-
Accountant fees
- Thread starter funkylady
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Do I detect a slight dislike or possibly fear of accountants ? Help is available here :-
ubiquitous
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Is that a surprise? The basic laws of supply and demand would show how in all business sectors, trades and professions, emergency service costs more - not least because of extra staff overtime etc. Look at Woodies DIY with their high prices and long opening hours for a good example
And I suppose you work for free as well
Fyi, newly-qualified accountants are not allowed practice until they have accumulated a number of years of post-qualification experience.
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rabbit
Guest
We are not talking about "emergency" services -the other poster wrote that he/she "noticed in the past is that at it gets closer to the deadline, fees can certainly go up."
To answer your second point, no I do not work for free, but I do not charge 700 an hour either, or quarter that even.
An yes, FYI,
"A newly qualified accountant , hungry + setting up in practice, should still be able to do the job " Filling in a vat return is not rocket science, especially with only the 4 customers per vat period the other poster was talking about.
To answer your second point, no I do not work for free, but I do not charge 700 an hour either, or quarter that even.
An yes, FYI,
"A newly qualified accountant , hungry + setting up in practice, should still be able to do the job " Filling in a vat return is not rocket science, especially with only the 4 customers per vat period the other poster was talking about.
ubiquitous
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My point still stands regardless of you definition of what is or is not an "emergency". If you want a product or service when demand exceeds supply, and/or urgently, be prepared to pay a higher price - regardless of the business sector.
..but if your employer or customer was willing to quadruple the rate they were paying you, you would refuse on a point of principle?
You missed my point, newly qualified accountants are not allowed to set up in practice, regardless of whether or not they are technically competent to do vat returns.
ubiquitous
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This is as meaningless as saying. "Go to Joe Bloggs Motors. He only charged me €2,000 for a car."
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rabbit
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So accountants can charge more in Sept or October than in May or June, because of revenue tax deadlines ? And its ok for an accountant to charge 700 euro per hour in fees ?
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rabbit
Guest
What has Joe Bloggs Motors got to do with it ? At least he would not do a few hours work repairing someones car and then charge 20,000 euro, would he ? Do not confuse the rotten apples in the car industry barrell with those in the accountancy barrell.
1) This €700 per hour has become something of a crusade with you. I can assure you that most high-street accountants , running average practice, are NOT earning anything remotely like this for normal accountancy/taxation work. Believe me . There may be a few situations as you described but they are NOT TYPICAL. There are also situations where spending €700 p h may save so much more that it is more than well worth it. A client of mine recently paid €1,750+VAT for 5 hours ( €350 hr ) for one of the best tax minds in the country. It saved the client over €100,000. Enough said.
2)We notify all clients well in advance of the deadlines. We give them a time limit by which we need the records in able to give us enough time to get the work done. We DO NOT charge extra just because its the busy time. The client's agreed fee is just that, whether the work is done in January or October. Now, if someone approached me the 3rd week in October with a rush job and expected me to drop everything and do it and I had to work beyond normal business hours ( which incidentally are usually way more than 8 per day ) . Then I do not consider a fee based on that additional out of normal time to be unreasonable. No more than anyone working overtime would.
Ubiquitous is correct. Someone saying
"They did my accounts for 350 as a startup price."
is utterly meaningless unless one is possessed of substantially more information to be able to decide whether, in the circumstances, that reflected a fair price for the work done. The analogy with J B Motors hits the nail right on the head IMO.
And as for confusing barrells, why not compare them. There are rotten apples in all walks of life but that doesn't mean we should tar everyone in that walk of life with the same brush. I know someone who recently paid €60 to have "free AVG" put on a computer by a "techie". Yeah right. (took me less than 10 mins to do it) Does that mean all such IT people are chancers? I don't think so.
ubiquitous
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Rabbit, where did you get it into your head that accountants charge 700 euro per hour? The actual rate for a qualified, experienced practice accountant at partner level is in my experience between a quarter and a fifth of that - in fact not much more on an hourly basis than a senior mechanic would charge for repairing a car or a tradesman would charge for a callout.
You seem to have some special grievance against accountants and the fees they charge. I don't know if you get equally upset about the fees charged by auctioneers or solicitors, both of whose average per hour rates would usually greatly exceed those charged by accountants. All auctioneers and most solicitors routinely charge % fees even when the time spent on the work is small.
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rabbit
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rabbit
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earlier " ubiquitous" wrote "If you want a product or service when demand exceeds supply, and/or urgently, be prepared to pay a higher price - regardless of the business sector." Obviously this reinforces the importance of shopping around / getting quotations etc when it comes to accountants.
This applies to ALL services, not just accountants. If you want a plumber on a christmas morning to fix a burst pipe then I hardly imagine you'd expect to pay flat rates, I certainly wouldn't. Rather than continuing accountant bashing, as pleasant as it may seem to some, rather focus on the core issue... if one needs a service, any service, then shop around, get the price which fits your need bearing in mind price and quality of service and what needs to be done and then decide accordingly.
ubiquitous
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Indeed it does. When you think about it, it also reinforces the difficulty of properly "shopping around / getting quotations etc" if the customer waits until the last minute before doing anything about their accounts & tax returns needs and then expects instant service from accountants at the height of the tax deadline season.
Btw, leghorn's initial observation that "as it gets closer to the deadline, fees can certainly go up" is borne out by the following thread
http://www.askaboutmoney.com/showthread.php?t=66821 which indicates that many accountants have a (not unjustified) policy of turning away all new business during the tax deadline season. It isn't surprising then that other accountants (who keep their doors open to new clients during the busy period) can command higher fees from customers who are willing to pay for "rush-hour" service.
Remember, nobody is forcing customers to pay for such a service. They have several options; they are free to go elsewhere; they can prepare their own returns; or they can simply leave their tax returns until after the deadline and end up paying penalties to the Revenue, and moving up a notch on the Revenue's Revenue Audit risk-profiling system.
If they take the latter option, the cost of the late filing penalties would almost always exceed any fee premium they would have paid to the accountant (that is, if they had found one in the first instance). The potential cost (in time and/or money) of an audit would dwarf even the most excessive fee.
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rabbit
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We are not talking about Xmas morning accountants. God know what they would charge to work then !
At least Graham 07 writes " We DO NOT charge extra just because its the busy time. The client's agreed fee is just that, whether the work is done in January or October.", so like I said not all accountants are the same. The fee you end up paying may not necessarily depend on their mood / how much money you have / if its a start-up business or not etc.
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rabbit
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Exactly. Most business people I know have ended up being billed / just paying an ever increasing amount each year.