Yourself or an accountant: how to work it out

You are allowed to do your own sole trader bookkeeping. That is worth saying out loud first, because on an accounting firm’s own website a reader expects to hear the opposite. Plenty of sole traders keep their own books for years, and there is nothing wrong with it.

The real question is different: when does it stop being the cheaper option.

The price is not the number you should be looking at

When people compare doing it themselves with outsourcing, the comparison usually rests on one number: what the accountant charges per month. It is an easy number to use, because it is the only one on display.

Your own work does not appear on an invoice. It appears in the evenings spent sorting receipts, and in the two hours that go on one unclear expense. Bookkeeping is not difficult in any single place. It is a lot of small things, each of which has to be right and on time.

So work out the two figures that normally go uncounted:

How much time it takes. Not in the good month when everything is in order, but on average, including the month the accounts are closed. If you bill your own work by the hour, you already have a price for that time.

What a mistake costs. This is the side that is uncomfortable to estimate, which is exactly why it gets skipped. A late return, a deduction treated wrongly, an obligation nobody noticed: none of these costs a fixed amount. It costs whatever it happens to cost, and it arrives at a moment you did not choose.

Three points where the line usually gets crossed

In practice the same three situations keep coming up.

Turnover grows. The number of receipts grows at roughly the same rate. What worked at ten purchases a month does not work at a hundred, and the method that handled them tends to fail without warning.

Something new comes in. Cross-border trade, a first employee, an equipment purchase, operating in two countries. Each of these brings rules you did not need to know last year, and the first time is the expensive time.

Time genuinely runs out. This is the most common of the three and the one that never gets counted. Bookkeeping does not disappear in a busy month, it moves. And books picked up six months behind are a different job from books kept monthly.

What outsourcing does not remove

Two things stay with you, and it is fair to name them.

The obligation is yours. The firm does the work and answers for its work, but the filings are your business’s filings. That is why a good accountant asks you questions instead of guessing.

The receipts are still yours. They have to reach us, and the more orderly they are the cheaper the work gets. Most of that can be automated now, but it does not go to zero.

How we answer this

We bill by the time it takes, to the minute, and the monthly fee has a ceiling. That is not a slogan, it is the answer to this exact calculation: when the price follows the work, a small sole trader does not pay like a large one, and a quiet month does not pay like a busy one.

The figures are on the pricing page. How it works sets out what is required of you in practice, and who it is for says plainly who it does not suit.

If you are working this out, ask us. Tell us your turnover, roughly how many purchases you have and what is taking the time now, and we will tell you what it would cost here. If doing it yourself still makes sense in your situation, we will say that too.