The true cost of the owner doing the work

• Every job in a practice carries a cost except one: the owner's own hours.
• Twelve hours a week of production is 552 hours a year — 69 working days.
• Charge-out rates for a senior in a local practice run £65–£95 an hour. You are doing that work at nothing and paying for it at partner rate.
• Hiring is not the cheap escape: the agency fee alone on a £36,000 salary is £5,400–£7,200 before anyone starts.
• What matters is what a practice owner does with 552 hours.

The one job that never gets costed

Open your job list. Every line on it has a cost you could quote from memory: what a set of accounts takes to produce, what a VAT return takes, what payroll costs per employee per month. You price against those numbers. You argue about them.

Now find the line for the twelve hours you spent last week. The Thursday evening on a bank reconciliation because the records came in late and the deadline was Monday. The Saturday morning drafting a set of accounts because the file was a mess and it was quicker than explaining it to anyone. The forty minutes chasing a P60.

There is no line. That work carries no cost, so it never gets managed, and the practice runs on a quiet assumption that the owner's time is free. It is the most expensive time in the building.

What an hour of the owner's time is worth

Two published figures frame it. Charge-out rates for a senior accountant in a local or small practice sit at £65–£95 an hour, rising to £75–£120 in the Midlands and the North and £100–£150 across Greater London and the South East (Eternity Accountants, December 2025). Across the profession as a whole, rates run from about £75 to £250 an hour depending on the grade of the person doing the work (Assured Accounting Services, August 2026).

So when the owner of a practice does a bank reconciliation, two things happen at once. The work gets done at the bottom of that range and the person doing it sits at the top of it. No invoice is raised for the difference, so it never appears in the management accounts.

Putting numbers on it

Here is an illustrative practice. It is not a client, and the figures are ordinary: a sole owner, two staff, and twelve hours a week of hands-on production — bookkeeping, VAT, drafting, records-chasing — that the owner does personally because both staff are already fully booked.

The recruitment percentages are the standard band for mainstream permanent professional roles in the UK (Mason Bedford, June 2026). On top of the fee come employer National Insurance and pension contributions at the rates published on gov.uk, a desk, software licences, and three months before the new person is useful on your files.

Read the table again and notice which number is missing. There is no line for what the practice could have earned in those 552 hours, because that number does not exist yet. It depends entirely on what the owner would have done instead.

The three costs, in order of size

1. The hour you spend

The smallest of the three, and the only one anyone ever mentions. It is real — £41,400 of senior-grade work in the example above — but it is the least of your problems.

2. The work you never sold

A full advisory meeting is about three hours: preparation, the meeting itself, and the follow-up that turns it into something the client acts on. Five hundred and fifty-two hours is 184 of those. No practice needs 184 advisory meetings a year, which is the point — you would need only a fraction of the time back to change what the practice sells. The hours are not the constraint. They are already spent.

3. The price you never reviewed

This is the expensive one and nobody counts it. Fee reviews get postponed because they take a clear head and an uninterrupted week, and the owner who is doing production has neither. Two hundred clients at an average fee of £1,400 is £280,000 a year in fees. A single fee review that lifts the average by £120 is £24,000 a year, every year, on work you are already doing. It does not happen in a January when the owner is preparing returns.

Doing the work because you are faster at it

You probably are. An owner who has done every job in the practice for twenty years is usually the quickest person in the building at most of them. Each hour taken back on that logic looks reasonable on its own. Added up over a year, those hours are a large part of the owner's week.

The test is this: if you did not do that job this week, would the practice notice next month? A bank reconciliation you did on Thursday evening — no. A conversation with the client whose turnover has doubled — yes. Sort your week by that question.

Do this in the next fortnight

You need two weeks of data.

• Log every hour for ten working days. One line per task, no categories yet. Do it on paper if the software makes you self-conscious.
• Mark each line P or O. P is production — work a competent senior could do. O is owner's work — selling, pricing, advising, hiring, deciding.
• Add up the P hours and multiply by 23. That is your annual production load, in hours.
• Divide by 160. That tells you roughly which seat size the work is: up to 40 hours a month is a 40-hour seat, 40–80 is an 80-hour seat, and above that is a 160-hour seat. The capacity calculator does the same sum from client numbers instead.
• Write down what you would do with the O hours. If you cannot fill them with something worth more than £75 an hour, do not buy anything.

What a seat takes off your desk

A seat is one of our employees in Pretoria whose working month belongs to your practice, reviewed and signed off in the UK by you. A Production seat takes the bookkeeping, VAT, payroll and admin; an Accounts seat takes year-end, CT600s, self assessment and management accounts; the same hours can go on marketing instead when that is what the month needs. Prices and sizes are on the pricing page and the mechanics are on how it works.

What does not move is your judgement. You still review, you still sign, you still hold the client relationship. What moves is the twelve hours a week, and with them the reason you have been telling yourself for three years that the fee review can wait until things calm down.

They do not calm down. That is the finding.

Where to start

Do the two-week log first — it is free and it settles the argument better than we can. Then put your client numbers into the capacity calculator to see which seat the work needs, and talk to us about what your first month would look like.

Published 1 September 2026. Tax rules and rates change, so check current figures on gov.uk before relying on anything here. This is general information for practice owners and is not advice.