I have 2 potential clients at the moment, both retail business. Most of my experience to date has been from doing my own books for a retail business. I am therefore hoping to specialise in doing the books for shops. If anyone else is doing the books for small shops etc. how many hours a week would you spend on each shop. I'm trying to work out how many clients I will need to be full time. When I did my own books I spent about 4 - 5 hours a week does that seem about right?
4-5 hours per week sounds like quite a lot to me... but it depends so much on the shop, the size, and mostly on the number of transactions, type and range of produces as well as the processes in place.
There may be weekly or even daily targets, but the actually bookkeeping could probably be done monthly and I'd take a wild guess that a day a month would be ample for most small shops.
Entering it in one go as a batch is far more efficient than doing it on a daily basis. And providing daily sales records are adequately kept these should be fairly quick to enter.
There are really too many variables though to just say how many clients would make it full-time but I'd take a stab at maybe 20 for someone providing an efficient service.
Thanks for the advice David. I was basing this on my own shop where I used to do the bookkeeping, but I did weekly wages, cashflow reports, paying suppliers and budgets etc. so I doubt I will be doing these. However I have 2 possible jobs one for a hairdresser who requires me to do approx 15 hours a month, he wants me take over from existing bookkeeper / accountant, he is happy to pay me what he pays at the moment £250 and the other client wants me to do about 5 hours a week, we have talked around £15 to £20 per hour. So my first 2 (potential) clients need me for 3 - 5 hours a week.
If your clients are happy with it, and it's more of a full service (payroll etc) then it sounds fair.
You might also be able to provide them a fixed price, and look at ways you can provide it more efficiently to make it not only more profitable, but to enable you to add extras and look after them that little bit more without extra cost!
