Why there is no price list
Two companies can hold the same licence, in the same free zone, in the same trade, and be ten times apart in work. One keeps its books in QuickBooks, reconciles every month and has forty transactions. The other has two years unreconciled, three bank accounts, a shareholder who pays suppliers from a personal card, and a box of receipts.
A published price has to cover the second company, or the firm loses money on it. Which means everybody in the first group is quoted too much. That is the real reason the price lists you find online are either vague ranges wide enough to be useless, or a low number that gets corrected upwards once somebody actually looks at your file.
The five things that decide your fee
1. Transaction volume. Bookkeeping is priced on how many things happened, not on your revenue. A property company with eight rent receipts a month is cheaper to keep than a café with two thousand card settlements, even if the café is smaller.
2. The state of the opening position. A first engagement where last year was closed properly and audited starts from a known point. A first engagement where it was not means somebody has to build the opening balances before the real work starts, and that is a separate job with its own price.
3. How many systems the numbers live in. One accounting system with bank feeds is one job. A spreadsheet, a POS system, a payroll provider and a bank that has to be typed in by hand is four.
4. Whether the work is regulated. Bookkeeping is a service. An audit is a regulated opinion signed by a registered auditor, and a corporate tax return can be filed by a Tax Agent listed with the Federal Tax Authority. Regulated work carries file documentation, review and retention obligations that unregulated work does not, and that is in the price.
5. Currencies and entities. One company in dirhams is one set of numbers. A group with a US subsidiary, intercompany balances and two reporting currencies is several, and they all have to agree with each other.
What makes an audit dearer than it needed to be
- Bank accounts that were never reconciled, so every difference has to be chased
- Large purchases with no invoice or contract behind them
- Balances with the owner or a related company that nobody can explain
- Inventory that was never counted at the year end, which cannot be counted later
- A first audit with no reliable opening balances
- Records arriving in pieces over eight weeks instead of once
Every one of those adds testing, and testing is the cost. The single biggest thing that brings an audit fee down is closing the books every month during the year, so that the year end is a formality rather than a reconstruction. That is why monthly accounting usually pays for a good part of itself in the audit fee.
Hourly billing, and why we do not do it
Hourly billing puts the risk of a messy job on the client. You find out what it cost after it is finished, and the messier your records, the more you pay for somebody else to discover that. A fixed fee puts that risk on the firm, which is where it belongs, because the firm is the party who can estimate it after looking at the file.
The condition that makes a fixed fee fair is that the scope is written down. If the scope changes, and sometimes it does, the change is quoted in writing before anybody does the work. No invoice should ever contain a surprise.
How to get a real number
Send two documents: your trade licence, and last year's financial statements or the last return you filed. If neither exists yet, send the licence and a month of bank statements. That is enough for us to see the volume, the state of the records and whether the work is regulated.
You get a fixed fee in writing within one business day, before any work starts. If we think you do not need what you asked for, we say so then, not after invoicing for it. See how we quote for what the letter contains.