[Question] Some advice needed

[pedrob]

hi
This might be a little difficult to get through but here goes : I have a supermarket and have an accountant like everyone else, but the thing that ticks me is their billing.
After coughing up hard earned money for about 5 years for their services i decided to do homework and slowly started taking things away from them, like Paye and uif is done by me now, vat is done by me now(submitted on efiling and paid).

Now the shock, they asked me they needed to do the paye recons, and gave me instructions on how they wanted it to be presented to them, names, id's etc, all in a specific format. Which i did and now to my suprise i get an account for R2350.00 + vat for doing my recons.

Now my question is if i decide to take on easy file myself, do i need to inform them? Since i take it they using it too, wont it "clash" or something??

Im all ears....

[Dave A]

Now my question is if i decide to take on easy file myself, do i need to inform them? Since i take it they using it too, wont it "clash" or something??

I'd think you should inform them! Apart from potential problems at SARS come submission time, there's absolutely no sense in both of you putting in the work.

Are you concerned your accountants might be offended?

[prettypegagirl]

I agree with Dave, you need to inform them. If you don't they can still expect payment from you! (This just happened to one of our clients). Without his knowledge they expected a month's notice, so he had to still pay the account

[Blurock]

I don't mind paying if I get value for money. Do you have the time to do the recons yourself? Do you have the time and inclination to correspond or have meetings with SARS when things go wrong? Do you have enough knowledge to be able to argue with a sometimes irrational SARS official?

What you should be asking is what value does the accountants deliver. You can always negotiate a fee with them. It is much like paying the carpenter. Not for hitting the nail into the floorboard, but knowing where to place the nail...

[CLIVE-TRIANGLE]

hi

Now the shock, they asked me they needed to do the paye recons, and gave me instructions on how they wanted it to be presented to them, names, id's etc, all in a specific format. Which i did and now to my suprise i get an account for R2350.00 + vat for doing my recons.

Now my question is if i decide to take on easy file myself, do i need to inform them? Since i take it they using it too, wont it "clash" or something??

Im all ears....

I'm assuming this was to enable them to do the emp501/601/701 irp5 job? I think that is what you are referring to and if so, the fee would depend on whether you are using an electronic or manual payroll and how many employees you have.

Supermarkets tend to have more staff than most, because casual staff for this exercise are no different than permanent staff. If I am right and it was for this job, have a look at all the issues and posts on the tax section of this forum and you might just think they were cheap

[pedrob]

thanks for all the feedback

I have 14 employees and remember that i had to present it to them the way they wanted, ie, all the staff in order with their ids, adresses and everything in as specific format, i am runninga online payroll. Spoke to the accountants "lady" who is in charge of easy file dept and she told me that the way i did it for them let them easily do the recons, i even balanced the emp201's with the monthly payslips for them. Surely shoouldnt they be charging me for time spent on my work? At that price it seems like they worked about 10 hours on it, which she insists they did not!!

[CLIVE-TRIANGLE]

Ok 14 is really not that many to manually capture. Even worse if the online system generates the data for you, as most of them do!

All firms have their own fee structure. My firm would have charged a total of R1560 plus VAT. That's for a recon of less than 100 employees @ R1000 plus R40 per employee and includes printed copies of all recons and IRP5's/IT3's, and recorded on CD for won records. But like I said, all firms to their own.

I know of some folk who spent a very long time on this, due to easyfile issues (SARS). This year we had zero issues; everything worked fine. Had we experienced the issues of many who commented in the tax section, we would have been down the drain in respect of this service, as I don't expect clients to carry the can.

In general, the terms of your accountant's engagement are renewed annually. Make sure that besides their statutory function, they are doing what you want them to do - it's actually a requirement in the standards. There is also nothing wrong with asking them to price those additional services.