Who does what when a practice uses an outsourced team

• Your practice reviews, signs off and files the work, because the client engaged your firm, your professional body licenses it and your insurance covers it.
• Advice to clients stays with you. Where a preparer has a view, it goes in a note to you.
• The seat prepares the work in your software under a named login, and our own UK practice reviews accounts and tax work before it reaches you.
• A quote follows a look at a sample of the files, so the seat size and the ramp-up time are the real ones.

Why the split is worth writing down

Most outsourcing websites are a list of yeses: any work, any volume, any software, any turnaround. We run a practice and have read those pages as a buyer, and the question they leave open is what happens at the edges. Here is where the edges are with a Muckin seat, and who holds what on each side of them.

What stays with your practice

Review, sign-off and filing

Every set of accounts, every return and every payroll run is prepared in Pretoria and reviewed by our own UK practice before it reaches you. It then comes to you to review again and put your name to. You file it, and you approve it for the client. The client engaged your firm, your professional body licenses your firm and your indemnity insurance covers your firm, so the person signing is the person who is accountable. The review loop in how it works is built around that.

Advice to your clients

Your clients deal with your firm. Whether a director takes a dividend or a salary, whether a business should register for VAT, what a set of accounts means for next year: those conversations are yours. If a query needs a client's input, it comes to you as one list per job and you decide how to put it to them. Where a preparer has a view that would help, it goes in a note to you, and you decide what the client hears.

Audit

Audit is a regulated activity with its own rules on who can do what and where independence sits, so audit work stays with your registered auditor from start to finish. A Muckin seat does accounts production, bookkeeping, VAT, payroll, management accounts, back-office work and marketing.

The HMRC agent relationship

Your agent credentials, your authorisation with the client and your name on the submission. Where the software submits, it does so under your practice's own agent set-up.

What the seat does

Prepares the work in your software

Every person on your seat works inside your practice's own software, under their own named login, with the permissions you set. Your audit trail shows who posted what and when, you can switch access off in a minute if the seat changes, and a data-protection question has a straight answer. Where a piece of software has one user licence and you want the seat in it, the seat gets its own licence.

Works from proper records

The seat works from bank feeds, proper exports, or statements that have come through your practice's own document system. Bank data sitting in a messaging app is a data-protection question for your practice, and a cropped screenshot with the running balance missing is how transactions go missing. If clients send records that way, moving them onto a proper route is a good first job for a Production seat.

Raises queries in one list

Each query has a date, an amount, a payee and a specific question, with a suggested treatment where there is one. The list comes to you, and you choose whether you send it to the client or we do, under your firm's name.

The first month

A new seat is learning your practice in its first month: logins, your templates, your review preferences, the particular way your firm handles a director's loan. By the second month it is carrying a normal load. If you are planning a January around a seat, start it in November. The ramp for your software and your kind of work is part of the plan we give you before you start, and the sequence is on how it works.

How a quote is put together

A firm price follows a look at a sample of the files, the software you run, the volumes and the state of the records. From that we tell you which seat fits, for how many hours, and how long the ramp is. The price list is public, and looking first means the number we give is the number you pay.

What the seats cover

Year-end accounts, CT600s, self assessment and management accounts on an Accounts seat. Bookkeeping and VAT, payroll and admin, and marketing are each a Production seat. All of it under your firm's name, reviewed in the UK, in your software.

Where to start

Use the capacity calculator to size the work, then get in touch. Bring a sample file, and we will look before we quote.

Published 22 August 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.