How much should you be charging for company secretarial services?

Starting a company secretarial service is a good move for many accounting firms – your clients need support to stay within company regulations, and they need to save time on complicated admin tasks.

As an expert in handling tricky regulations on behalf of clients, you’re in the ideal position to provide this service. 

But setting fees for it can be a tricky balance. If you set them too high you might struggle to win enough business, but too low and you’ll be putting a lot of resources towards new work for your firm without seeing much return.

Pricing your company secretarial service

To work out what you should be charging for your service, you’ll need to take into account a number of factors, including your:

Time: As with any professional work, you need to charge enough to make the service worth your time. Estimate how long all of the tasks involved in a company secretarial service will take you and your team, considering the cost across different levels of seniority. If you can find opportunities to streamline and automate these administrative tasks, you can make your service more cost-effective.

Risk: Company secretarial duties are all about meeting legal requirements. This is a high degree of responsibility for you as the provider of these services – if things go wrong, there’s the potential for serious professional damage. For this reason, it’s vital that you pin down the details of the service you’re providing with your client, in writing, and understand exactly what your responsibilities and liabilities are. But considering the risk involved, you should factor this into the value of your service.

Expertise: You’re offering this service because you and your team can do it faster, more accurately and more efficiently than your client can. That’s because of the knowledge you’ve built up over the years, through professional training and experience. Take into account the time spent acquiring your skills and knowledge when you set the price for your service.

Value: Ultimately, the value of a service is what your clients are willing to pay for it. Think about it from their perspective – what does your company secretarial service provide, and how much does it mean to them? The chances are, people are willing to pay more for a service that’s smooth, stress-free, and genuinely helpful to them. The better you can make the client experience overall, the more your clients will value it. 

Packaging up your company secretarial service

The way you package and sell your service is another thing to consider. 

Will you perform isolated tasks (like registering a new company, filing confirmation statements, updating company changes with Companies House) on an ad-hoc basis, charging a small amount each time? Or will you carry out the full service for a recurring fee? 

Fees for the former option often range between £10-£30 per form filing, while the latter might be an annual fee anywhere between £100-£400, depending on the level of service included.

For many accounting firms, a subscription-style pricing model is an effective and sustainable source of income, allowing you to maintain and build on your relationships with clients. 

But your business model may vary, and you might find offering lots of company registrations with a speedy and efficient process works for you. You could also think about introducing tiers of service for different types or sizes of client, as well as offering add-ons to a base package.

Capium’s all-in-one accounting software makes company secretarial services easy. Talk to us to find out more.