Hi, could I have some honest opinions please. I'm setting up as a self employed bookkeeper, currently on a part time basis. I have spent the past 12 years gaining significant experience within accountancy practices and therefore thought that I should work to my strengths and try to contact local accountants for outsourced work. I have an excellent reference from my employer (recently retired).
Does anyone here get much work outsourced to them? If so do you charge the accountants the same amount as you would for a client you found yourself? or a lower fee for recommendations? What do you consider a reasonable rate per hour for bookkeeping?
When employed, the actual cost to my employer including Er's NIC would have been about £12.34 an hour, taking into account 4 weeks holiday and about a weeks sick (be more for hours lost due to admin). So I was thinking about £14-£15 an hour for bookkeeping. Any thoughts?
I appreciate that you get a lot of questions regarding hourly rate, but I'm trying to show a link between my employed rate (my employer highly respected me) and my expertise to new clients. I know that when I was employed, any work that I did was charged at £28 an hour to clients (£30 for payroll).
This is one of the oldest questions in the book when looking at self employed and you will get various answers dependant on where you are based, your experience etc etc
If hourly, could be £8-£10 up to £20-£25 per hour, some like to charge a fixed fee per month, I think its down to how you work and your rapport with clients.
If getting work from accoutants, I would think you would charge a lower rate as they are not your clients but it does depend on whether you are working for the accountants direct or the client via the accountants - and they will have thier own views on what they want to pay.
All that was probably not much help, sorry, but I don't know your area to well. Down here in the South £15/hr would not be unreasonable.
As Philip has said, this is pretty much horses for courses in terms of the hourly rate achievable. Personally I favour a fixed rate as the hourly rate equivalent works out much higher than if I charged by the hour, and a whole host of benefits to the client.
However, if you have your heart set on hourly rate then go for it. I would phone other bookkeepers in your area posing as a potential client (I know it's not nice, but its the only way) to find out the average rate charged in your area.
In terms of discount for accountants I would say yes, but only if they are putting enough work your way. I offer a discount to any client who introduces another client to me. I suppose the way to think about it is to work out the cost of achieving a client by a more traditional means of advertising, but also the amount a client is worth to over their lifetime. It's maybe worth a couple of quid off.
Although, the only thing I would say is that if you are discounting their bookkeeping clients and they discounting your accounting clients?
The views expressed in this post are my own personal (HRA protected) views, and are not representative of any organisation I have any involvement with.
I think if you are billing the accountant directly, then they will want to add a margin onto the charges since they would be taking responsibility and as such the rate may be a tad lower. However I think a lot depends on the kind of job it is and the qualities of the bookkeeper. I use a self employed bookkeeper for my regular bookkeeping work and she bills me around 100 hours per month at £8.50 an hour (I think she charges her own clients around £15) which I will charge out (often on a fixed fee basis) for anything from £12 to £50 per hour (it's amazing how the rate goes up if you charge £50 per month and you do the quarters vat return within 3 hours!). I also pay another bookkeeper £15 per hour. The jobs I give her are less frequent and are more likely to be annual jobs where I need the bookkeeping sorted so I can finalise accounts and tax returns and the price of the bookkeeping is swallowed up in the total I charge out.
i think the answer to the question is much like the answers we give to a lot of our clients when they ask something technical....'it depends....'
Thanks for the replies. I know that there are so many factors to consider. I think I will be charging less for outsourced worked. I'm actually going to meet up with a local accountant next week to see whether they can put any work my way. See what happens
