Outsourced accounts production for UK practices: the complete guide

• Accounts production is the year-end accounts, the corporation tax computation, the self assessment returns and the management accounts: the recurring, deadline-driven work that fills a practice's diary from October to January.
• It is sold three ways: per job, per hour, or as a person for a set number of hours a month. Each puts a different amount of work back on your desk.
• The questions that separate providers are who employs the preparer, who reviews the work before it reaches you, whose software it is done in, and where the person sits.
• A UK part-qualified costs £44,000 to £52,000 a year all in for about 1,500 productive hours. Offshore prices run from £120 a set per job to £3,200 a month for a qualified accountant, depending on the country and the model.
• The first twenty sets decide whether it works. Send them with a handover pack, count the review time, and judge the provider on the numbers.

What accounts production covers

In a UK practice, accounts production is the work that turns a client's records into filed documents. Statutory year-end accounts under FRS 102 Section 1A and FRS 105, from the bookkeeping or from whatever the client sends. The corporation tax computation and the CT600. Self assessment returns for sole traders, landlords, directors and partnerships. Monthly or quarterly management accounts for the clients who want them. The bookkeeping clean-up that has to happen before any of that can start. And the file around each job: working papers, lead schedules, iXBRL tagging and a review notes sheet.

It is the largest block of chargeable hours in most small practices and the one with the hardest deadlines. Companies House wants the accounts nine months after the year end, HMRC wants the corporation tax nine months and a day after it, and the self assessment returns all fall due on the same night in January. The late filing penalty for accounts starts at £150, rises to £1,500 and doubles when a company is late two years running.

That is what makes it the first thing practices outsource. The work is recurring, it follows a standard, it is reviewed before it is filed, and it arrives in a pile.

Why practices move it

Three reasons come up on nearly every call we take.

The first is hiring. A part-qualified in a UK practice in 2026 is advertised at £32,000 to £38,000 outside London, and the all-in cost, on our rule of thumb of salary times 1.35, is £44,000 to £52,000 a year. Divided by the roughly 1,500 productive hours a full-timer delivers once holidays, sickness, training and admin are taken out, that is £29 to £34 an hour of finished work. The working is in what a part-qualified really costs. Practices that have tried to recruit at that level in the last two years know how long the chair sits empty.

The second is the season. A practice sized for its average month is short of people from October to January and has too many in the summer. Overtime, temporary staff and the owner's own evenings fill the gap, and the gap comes back every year. Our year-end capacity planning guide works through the arithmetic of the peak.

The third is the owner's time. In a practice of three to eight people the owner is often the reviewer, the second preparer and the person who answers the client's bookkeeper. Moving the preparation out, with a review layer in front of it, gives the owner back the hours that were going into the pile.

The three ways it is sold

Every provider in the market sells one of three things, and some sell all three. Which one you buy decides what lands back on your desk.

Per job

A fixed fee per set of accounts or per return. For a small limited company the offshore market runs at about £120 to £300 a set (the range is in our three-country guide). The price covers the preparation. The queries, the re-learning of the client each year, the coordination and the review sit with the practice. It suits a backlog, a one-off surge or a practice that wants to try the idea with ten sets before committing to anything.

Per hour

An hourly rate, billed on time recorded. Published rates in our September 2026 audit of provider websites started at £7 an hour for a bookkeeper and £15 for an accountant. Hourly work is flexible and it is hard to budget, because the hours are the provider's to record and the practice finds out the cost after the work is done.

A person, for a set number of hours a month

A dedicated member of staff, sold as a full-time equivalent or as a seat. The practice gets the same person on every job, who learns the clients and the practice's standard. Our version is a seat: one person in one role for 160, 80 or 40 hours a month, with accounts and tax work reviewed by our own UK practice before it reaches you, at a fixed monthly price on the pricing page. The seats against per-job guide puts the two models side by side with a worked year.

How a job runs

The mechanics are the same on any well-run arrangement, whatever the model. This is how a set of accounts moves through our own team, and it is a fair test to put to any provider.

1. The job comes in. You send it through the portal with the papers and the deadline. The preparer confirms the scope, the estimated hours and the due date, so a job that is going to take longer than you expect is flagged before the work starts.
2. It is prepared your way. Your working-papers template, your file naming, your software. If you do not have a standard, the provider should bring one you can keep.
3. Queries arrive in one list. One list of client queries per job, each with the date the answer is needed by. You choose whether the list goes to the client from you or from the preparer.
4. It is reviewed before it reaches you. On our seats the accounts and tax work passes review by our own UK practice, and the preparer and the reviewer are always different people. On a per-job or staffing arrangement, ask who does this step; on many of them it is the practice.
5. You review, approve and file. The accounts, the computation and the notes sheet arrive in your system. Anything you mark up is corrected the same day. The filing is yours: it is your client and your signature.

A straightforward limited company from clean bookkeeping is usually back within five working days. A job that needs a clean-up first depends on the state of the records, and the estimate for that should arrive before the work does.

Who reviews the work

This is the question most provider websites leave unanswered. In our audit of 68 UK-facing outsourcing sites on 21 September 2026, two mentioned ICAEW, nine mentioned ACCA and none mentioned AAT, and most said nothing about who checks a set of accounts before it leaves the building. The full table is on the site.

The answer decides how much of the work you have moved. If the provider prepares and you review, you have moved the preparation and kept the review, and the review of an unfamiliar preparer's file takes longer than the review of your own team's. If the provider prepares and reviews, with a qualified reviewer who is a different person from the preparer, you have moved the whole job, and your review is the final check a partner would do anyway. Ask who the reviewer is, what they are qualified in, and whether the review notes come with the file.

A file built to a review standard makes the second model work. Lead schedules, cross-references, a query log and a notes sheet turn a two-hour review into a 25-minute one; the working papers guide sets out the standard we use.

Whose software

The work should be done inside your own systems under named logins you control. That keeps the client data where your engagement letter says it is, keeps the audit trail in one place and means the file is yours if the arrangement ends. Our team works in Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, FreeAgent and Dext for the bookkeeping, and IRIS, TaxCalc, CCH, BTCSoftware and Capium for the accounts and tax, plus the workflow tools that sit around them. Ask any provider to list theirs, and ask whether they will work in yours or expect an export.

Where the work is done

Of the 68 sites in the audit, 26 named India as the delivery country, five named the Philippines, three named South Africa and 30 did not say. The country decides three things: the working-day overlap, the qualifications the preparers hold, and the data transfer paperwork.

India is four and a half to five and a half hours ahead of the UK, the Philippines seven to eight, and South Africa, where our own team sits, one to two hours ahead all year. A shared working day matters most for accounts work, because a set of accounts for a client with an untidy ledger is finished by conversation, and each round trip of a query costs a day when the two sides are not online together. The two head-to-head guides, South Africa against India and South Africa against the Philippines, take each country through the clock, the qualifications and the published prices.

Whichever country, client data leaving the UK needs a lawful transfer mechanism under UK GDPR, a data-processing agreement, and named logins that can be removed the day a person leaves. The data security guide lists what the paperwork has to cover.

What it costs

The short version, with every figure on our pages or on the provider's own site.

The costs guide works through what each price includes and leaves out, with three worked examples at different practice sizes.

Getting started

The practices that get this right treat the first month as a test with numbers attached.

Pick twenty sets that represent the book: some clean, some untidy, one or two you are dreading. Build a handover pack for each: last year's accounts and working papers, the trial balance or the login, the engagement letter's scope, and the client's known quirks. Send the queries list back within two days of receiving it. Count the preparer's hours, your review time per set and the number of review points, and compare the twentieth set with the first. The handover guide sets out the pack and the numbers.

On our figures a set that takes five hours in the first month takes closer to three and a half to four by the third, once the client sheets exist and the recurring queries have been answered once. If the numbers move that way, extend the arrangement. If they do not, you have twenty sets of evidence and a month's notice.

Eight questions for any provider

1. Who employs the preparer, and where do they sit?
2. Who reviews the work before it reaches me, and what are they qualified in?
3. Is the work done in my software, under my logins?
4. What are the working hours, in UK time?
5. What does the price include, and what is billed on top?
6. What is the notice period?
7. What happens when the person is off, or leaves?
8. Which transfer mechanism covers my client data?

The provider checklist expands these to twenty questions, with what a good answer looks like and a scoring sheet.

Where to start

Put your client numbers into the capacity calculator to see the hours, then get in touch with your job list in front of you.

Published 22 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.