Twelve hours a week of production is 552 hours a year. Here is what those hours are worth, what they cost you, and what to do with them instead.
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.
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. Nobody sends an invoice for the difference, so it never appears in the management accounts.
Here is an illustrative practice. It is not a client and the figures are chosen to be ordinary rather than dramatic: 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 there is nobody else free.
| What | Number |
|---|---|
| Owner's production hours | 12 a week × 46 working weeks = 552 hours a year |
| The same hours in working days | 552 ÷ 8 = 69 days, or roughly 14 working weeks |
| Those hours valued at a small-practice senior rate of £75 | £41,400 of production work |
| A half Production seat (80 hours a month, 960 a year) | £1,100 a month = £13,200 a year, about £13.75 an hour |
| Recruiting instead: agency fee on a £36,000 salary at 15–20% | £5,400–£7,200, payable before the first day's work |
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 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.
An advisory meeting, done properly, 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.
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. A book of 200 clients at an average fee of £1,400 is £280,000. A single properly-run review round 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.
You are, and that is the trap. The owner of a practice is genuinely the quickest person in the building at almost every job in it, because they have done all of them for twenty years. Every hour they take back on that logic is defensible on its own and indefensible in aggregate.
The honest test is not speed. It 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 and the answer stops being about efficiency.
You do not need a project. You need two weeks of honest data.
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.
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 actually is, and talk to us about what your first month would look like. If the honest answer is that you have nothing better to do with the hours, we will tell you so.
Published 1 September 2026. Tax rules and rates change — check current figures on gov.uk before relying on anything here. This is general information for practice owners, not advice.
Start with what the practice bills for the work you are actually doing, not what you would like your time to be worth. Published charge-out rates for a senior accountant in a local or small UK practice run £65 to £95 an hour, and rates across the profession span roughly £75 to £250 depending on grade. Take the hours you spend on production in a normal week, multiply by 46 working weeks, and value them at the bottom of that band. That figure is what your practice is producing through its most expensive person. Then ask the harder question, which is what those same hours would earn doing work only an owner can do.
Almost always, yes, and that is what makes it a trap rather than an argument. An owner who has run a practice for twenty years is the quickest person in the building at nearly every task in it, so every individual decision to pick a job up is defensible. The aggregate is not. The useful test is not speed but consequence: if you had not done that job this week, would the practice notice next month? Bank reconciliations and records-chasing fail that test. Fee reviews, advisory conversations and hiring decisions pass it. Sort a week's work by that question rather than by how quickly you could clear each item.
Not once you count the whole cost. A recruitment agency fee for a mainstream permanent professional role in the UK is 15 to 20 per cent of first-year salary, so £5,400 to £7,200 on a £36,000 hire before anyone starts. Add employer National Insurance and pension at the published gov.uk rates, software licences, a desk, and roughly three months before the new person is genuinely useful on your files. A half Production seat is £1,100 a month for 80 hours, which is about £13.75 an hour, starts within weeks and can be dropped with a month's notice.
Everything that carries your name. You review the work, you sign the accounts and returns, and you own the client relationship and the advice that goes with it. The seat prepares; the UK practice checks and signs. That division is deliberate rather than cautious, because the value of a practice sits in judgement and relationships, not in typing. In practical terms your week changes shape rather than emptying out: less preparation and chasing, more reviewing, pricing, advising and deciding. If you would rather keep doing the preparation yourself, a seat will not fix anything and you should not buy one.
Five hundred and fifty-two, on 46 working weeks after holiday and bank holidays. That is 69 eight-hour days, or about 14 working weeks — a quarter of the year spent on work a competent senior could do. It is also, for scale, 184 advisory meetings at three hours each including preparation and follow-up, or enough time to run a full fee review across a book of 200 clients several times over. The number matters less than the fact that it is already being spent. It is not time you need to find; it is time you are currently giving away without recording it anywhere.
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