ACCOUNTANCY & FINANCE

Accountants, like all professional consultants, need to charge what they are worth. They need to be confident of understanding their value, and working out what their time factored by their expertise means in hard fees.

But too often firms don’t have a grip on that equation – a mix of historic fee scales, instinctive charging, and project guesstimates, compounded by a lack of accurate timesheet data, means that many are consistently undervaluing their services and effectively running blind to the cost of doing business.

How long did that major audit last month take? How many people worked on it directly or contributed to it indirectly? How many hours were actually being worked per day when the fee was based on an 8-hr working day? Was scope creep monitored and addressed? Could resources have been deployed more effectively, more support offered? Was travel time noted? Exactly how profitable was that all consuming piece of work? Anyone?

Capturing the inputs/outputs of professionals – how much time they spend and what they achieve in that time, be that chargeable or non-chargeable – is a fundamental part of the figure work. That’s why Rekoop harvests every minute of daily time to establish your true cost base – and socialises that data throughout the firm to highlight your true worth.