Tradesmen are usually reticent people, performing their best behind the obscurity provided by their workstations or work benches. This trait is common to many scientists, researchers, doctors, sculptors, painters and even auditors. That may not be a common feature across all offices, but in our office, the best performers are reticent.
Our auditors are usually not good at marketing. And by inverse proportion, we believe it is equally likely that those good at marketing may not be great auditors. This presents us with a perplexing practical dilemma. Whom should we send to meet you?
If we send our best auditor, he is likely to tell you point blank – without showing sensitivity to your sentiments – something that is likely to annoy you. Think of a doctor dispensing negative prognosis insensitively – it’s something like this.
And if we send our best business developer, he is likely to be unable to answer your complex problem – although we have done our best to arm him with answers to most common and some uncommon questions.
Our overall experience is that it helps to send a business developer, than to send auditors, to retain clients.
As an added benefit, it also helps us to retain auditors by asking them to audit instead of meeting clients. No, not because clients poach our auditors – our clients are free to recruit our auditors. It’s more to do with the propensity of our auditors to avoid business development.
We charge fees by the hour, depending on the expertise of the person carrying out your work.
We’re contractors. Like doctors, lawyers, mechanics, cooks, plumbers, carpenters and the likes, we take contracts of writing accounts, preparing financial statements, filing tax returns, carrying out calculations, auditing books of accounts and about 60 such contracts.
We trade in expertise. So, we buy the time of different kinds of experts and sell it to you, our clients.
As a result of this, our “fee” is a product of the “level of expertise” and “time required”.
We have 6 levels of expertise. And we prefer rendering services from our office.
| Expertise | Competence Hourly | Fee |
|---|---|---|
| Trainee | Graduate with up to 1 year of experience | $10 to $30 |
| Accountant | Graduate with between 1 & 3 years’ experience or Semi-qualified with up to 1 year of experience | $50 |
| Administrator | This is like an Accountant, but does administrative work that accountants dislike but grudgingly do | $50 |
| Senior Accountant or Junior Auditor | Semi-qualified with between 1 & 3 years’ experience or Qualified with up to 1 year of experience | $100 |
| Auditor or Tax advisor | Qualified with more than 1 year of expertise and with reasonably good exposure to tax and compliance | $150 |
| Audit Director | Qualified with over a decade of experience | $250 |
This fee is for work performed at our office, that is remotely.
When the work is carried out from outside our office, the fee is at least doubled. This addition compensates for the cost of commuting, parking, refreshments and the time lost in commuting when work does not get done. The time spent in commuting is not billed to you – that means, only the time spent at your location is counted. However, if the work involves commuting, then the time spent in commuting is billed to you.
The three senior levels (that is all kinds of auditors) perform esoteric functions too. For example, due diligence, business valuation, feasibility studies, reports for court cases, etc. When they carry out complex work that is beyond accounts and audits, the fee is doubled.
If the work is of esoteric nature and involves commuting to your preferred location, then the fee is tripled to accommodate for the commute and expertise (it is not quadrupled).
VAT (value added tax) at applicable rates is in addition to all the above fees.
The work of some people gets done fast. The work of others drags on for longer.
This could be due to numerous reasons. Some people discuss more than others. Some maintain records that are difficult to understand. Some are simply unlucky. There are literally dozens of reasons why the exact same kind of work takes different time for different clients.
If we were to charge a fixed fee, then we need to evaluate the time required to carry out that task, consider the probability of the number of times it will take longer for some clients, divide that probability by the number of clients we expect to serve and add that to all clients. It is easy to do this. However, we believe it is unfair to add this extra time to everyone and prefer to charge it to only those to whom it applies.
We have some standard times for carrying out work.
For example, you can see our audit fee calculator, which has worked with less than ½% error for over a decade. Like that, we can indeed quote a fixed fee for about 20 out of the 60 odd services that we render. However, it is your interest that you let us charge fees by the hour, because it will almost always benefit you.
An even better idea for routine tasks like writing accounts and filing tax returns, we suggest you let us do your work for one or two quarters for us to get a feel of the work and then we’ll propose a fixed fee that works over that “volume of actions” (like number of transactions to post to the accounting system) and then we continue at that fixed fee.
And finally, we can always ask one of our partners who are based in different locations to serve you at a fixed fee – they will be very happy to do that in our stead.
We’re accountants. We’re supposedly good with numbers.
You ask us to quote by the hour or by the task or by any other standard unit of measurement you choose. We are going to find a figure that benefits us. So, if we wanted to take you for a ride, we would have already done that with a fixed fee.
Besides that, we maintain timesheets and evaluate them internally. These are used as a parameter to remunerate our teammates as well as an analysis tool for gauging their expertise. Your billing is as per these time sheets and if you wish you may see them.
Finally, we haven’t cheated anyone in the last roughly 30 years of being in practice and rendering almost the same services. It’s probably too late to change our habits.
Yes, or he / she will seek the help of his / her teammates to do your work.
