How many clients would you expect a new accounts assistant to handle?

How many clients would you expect a new...

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OK, I know this is a difficult one to measure, but I'm a standard high street accountant, with clients ranging from window cleaners to Ltd companies around the £100k - £500k mark.

I was wondering how many clients I should expect a competent accounts assistant/bookkeeper to manage on their own? I was anticipating offering a salary of £16.5k (I'm based in the North West) and expecting them to deal with 50 clients (30 sole traders and 20 small Ltd Co's). My average fee for such a basket of clients is £600, I'd be looking to make a profit of around £850 per month from the member of staff.

Once they had proven themselves, I would expect to provide them with another 10 clients in return for another £2k pay rise.

Would other small practitioners deem my expectations as reasonable?

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By Discountants
13th Jul 2015 14:14

Rules of thumb

A good rule of thumb is that you want your employees to be bringing in between 2 and 2.5 times their cost of employment.

This employee would cost around £17,700 (with the employer's NIC) so you want to aim for £35k to £45k, which would be 58-75 clients at an average fee of £600 per client.

 

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blue sheep
By NH
13th Jul 2015 14:33

seems a bit old fashioned

This seems a bit of an odd way of doing it to me, I know other practices do operate this way but I have never really understood why.

So if I understand correctly you are saying to someone, here are 50 clients to "manage" which I presume means book-keeping, payroll, VAT etc up to TB.

If they are very efficient and hard working they could get those done in a fairly short space of time, and then what?  sit around?  take a holiday?  There are sure to be large amounts of time where they have nothing to do.

It must also be very difficult to allocate a fair amount of work to each member of staff.

Doesnt strike me as being very efficient.

When we had five staff. all of them did a bit of everything, apart from wages which was one persons job, the rest of the work was just done by whoever was free at the time. 

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Replying to Tax Dragon:
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By Alex999
13th Jul 2015 14:54

I see what you mean

NH wrote:

This seems a bit of an odd way of doing it to me, I know other practices do operate this way but I have never really understood why.

So if I understand correctly you are saying to someone, here are 50 clients to "manage" which I presume means book-keeping, payroll, VAT etc up to TB.

If they are very efficient and hard working they could get those done in a fairly short space of time, and then what?  sit around?  take a holiday?  There are sure to be large amounts of time where they have nothing to do.

It must also be very difficult to allocate a fair amount of work to each member of staff.

Doesnt strike me as being very efficient.

When we had five staff. all of them did a bit of everything, apart from wages which was one persons job, the rest of the work was just done by whoever was free at the time. 

I see what you mean, I was attempting to quantify how many clients the average accounts assistant could handle. Just so I could plug it in to my spread sheet to obtain some sort of expected return on staff.

Just a ballpark figure on what I should be expecting from a member of staff. Like I said, I understand it is a difficult one to measure, but you guys that have experience in employing staff are likely to be my best bet.

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By Ken Howard
13th Jul 2015 15:48

1 per week?

I would have thought 50 "average" clients wouldn't take anywhere near a full time worker's available hours.  At £600 per client, you're presumably just talking about the year end accounts with maybe a bit of book-keeping, surely that's about a day per client, so 50 days - maybe a quarter of their available time?

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By uejorj
13th Jul 2015 16:53

Available hours
Assuming your accounts assistant can hit the ground running, ie minimal training - other than your in house systems, then work it out another way .
Say 35 hours per week for 46 weeks - allowing 4 weeks hols plus bank hols - equals 1610 hours per year.
If they handle say 60 clients they can allocate an average of close to 27 hours per client per year.
So a lot depends on the estimated time each client takes over the year.

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Sarah Douglas - HouseTree Business Ltd
By sarah douglas
13th Jul 2015 20:31

Not at a salary of 16.5K

I know you said you are in the North West but you would have no chance in Glasgow on that Salary.  Unless they are a trainee and do not know what they are doing.   I do not know any decent bookkeeper that would work for that.  It would be better for them to have their own practice they would still get more per hour.

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