How much do you spend for your accountant? Any tips to save money?
The annual costs for the accountant are high for a self-funded startup instead I would love to invest more in development or sales.
The annual costs for the accountant are high for a self-funded startup instead I would love to invest more in development or sales.
Find an accountant which works with QuickBooks Online who could work with you for fixed per-quarter fee.
Explain to them your business so they would set up required accounts for you.
It's easy to do all the book-keeping yourself in QBO
Then the accountant's job is really easy, they just need to reconcile your books every quarter.
Which is a reasonable price for this service? I need an accountant that makes the tax returns and all legal parcticies
Even in SV you can find accountants to do your year-end for under $1K / year provided you entered most of the data yourself and they just need do final reconciliation, filing and issue required forms.
What do you mean under "legal practices"?
There's a difference between book-keeping and accounting.
You can learn book-keeping inside a month. It is the process by which you record your sales and expenses.
If you can learn that (and there are plenty of online courses to help you), then you can do the grunt work yourself.
Accountancy is the art of working out your tax liability, financial planning and various other financial services.
Most accountants offer both book-keeping and accountancy services - but book-keeping via accountant is more expensive than doing it yourself or employing the services of a specialised book-keeping service. Most towns have practices that offer this service if you really can't face doing your own book-keeping.
The mistake a lof of start-ups make is to send all their documents in to their accountant to draw up and make sense of at the end of the financial year.
Ouch! Expensive!
Rules and regs differ between jurisdictions but the principles of double-entry book-keeping, invented by a monk called Pacioli over 400 years ago, are universal.
This course ( http://www.open.edu/openlearn/money-business/introduction-bookkeeping-and-accounting/content-section-0?active-tab=description-tab ) is eight hours long. It is free but I have no idea how good it is. The point of mentioning it is to demonstrate that there are courses like this all over the internet.
You're right! But there are legal practices, annual deadlines, the tax return, tax forms etc........if I can make mistakes in filling out these documents or I forget some deadline, it could be a huge problem :). So always I need to spend money for an consultant
True.
I actually worked in management accounting many years ago and have to file my partnership and personal returns for both me and my partner (she hates the tax side of things) so I'm not as scared of the tax forms as many people.
Mind you, HMRC goes to a lot of trouble to make their forms as clear as possible. My only experience of American tax forms has been the W8-BEN and variants. They are ugly and completely incomprehensible!
HI,
I have the perfect answer or say the solution to your problem. It's very common that a business owner can't manage to account on his own so accountant hiring is a must but its a costly expense as they will charge more. Accountants role is very imp same as their salary.
The best way to avoid this much of expense is by using an online or cloud accounting software. To use this software you can hire an accountant with basic knowledge. I would like to suggest an software which is very easy to use and covers all parts of accounting starting from invoice generation, billing to inventory management, income & expense management, reporting etc. And that is SlickAccount. https://www.slickaccount.com/gst-software/
It also has free trial. Go for free trial and use it. Then take your buying decision.
Thanks
Thank you! I like your product. I can manage bookkeeping with your tool, but I always need an accountant for legal practices.
I am in Japan. But I pay about US$250 a month. They spent the first year basically doing everything and getting me up to speed on the accounting program and processes and conventions they use. Then I do all the grunt work of entering details, they spend a half day each month in my office going over my entries, and giving me advice on various things. Then at tax time they put it all through for me.
In my case I have a registered company and all the tax laws and financial docs etc are in Japanese. Its expensive for sure, but I just need help and its worth it because it forces me to enter everything and get each month's finance organized before they visit each month.
Thank you for your reply!