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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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.
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.
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?
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.
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.