Seats vs per-job outsourcing: which model scales a practice

• Per-job outsourcing is the easiest to buy and the hardest to build a practice on. You pay per set and carry no idle time, but nobody learns your clients.
• A seat is a fixed block of monthly hours from a named person. You carry utilisation risk; you get continuity, faster queries and a flat cost.
• For a 120 year-end, 180 self assessment practice, per-job offshore costs roughly £17,000–43,000 a year. One Accounts seat is £31,800 and has hours left over.
• The difference shows up in the quiet months, in query handling, and in who knows the client next year.
• Per-job is the right answer at very low volume or for a one-off backlog. Above that, seats win.

Two ways to buy the same work

Say you have decided to outsource production. The next decision is how to pay for it, and it is a bigger decision than it looks, because the payment model decides who carries risk, who holds knowledge and what happens in a quiet month.

Per-job means a fixed price per set of accounts, per VAT return, per tax return. You send it, you pay for it, you are done. Seats means you rent a named person for a fixed number of hours every month, regardless of how many jobs you give them. We sell seats. We will try to be fair to per-job, because there are practices for whom it is the right answer, and we say which ones at the end.

The worked practice

Take a practice with 120 limited company year-ends, 180 self assessment returns, and no outsourced bookkeeping for now. A common shape for a two-partner firm. We will run it through both models using market rates.

Per-job at offshore market rates

Offshore per-job rates we see on published price lists in August 2026 are £120–300 for a small limited company set including the CT600, and £15–40 for a self assessment return. The low end is for a clean set with a tidy trial balance; the high end is for a messier job, or a provider who includes a review layer.

That is a wide range, and the reason is that per-job prices move with complexity. The practice that gets £120 a set is sending very clean work. Most practices we speak to land nearer the middle, and pay extra for anything that needs a second look.

One Accounts seat

An Accounts seat is £2,650 a month for 160 productive hours: £31,800 a year, 1,920 hours. Does one seat cover the practice above? Our estimate, from running this work, is that a small limited company set with CT600 takes an offshore preparer eight to twelve hours including working papers, and a self assessment return two to three hours. The capacity calculator uses the same assumptions, so you can adjust them for your own clients.

At the low end of the estimate, one seat does the whole practice and has around 600 hours left over for management accounts, a backlog, or the bookkeeping you have not outsourced yet. At the high end, it is slightly over, and a part-time seat at £850 a month for 40 hours covers the gap with 10% off as a second seat. Either way the cost is flat: £31,800 for the year, or a little more with the top-up. Full prices are on the pricing page.

Side by side

Per-job at £17,100–43,200 against a seat at £31,800. On raw cost, per-job at the bottom of its range is cheaper. At the top, it is dearer. In the middle, they are about the same. So the decision is not really about price. It is about what else you get, and what else you carry.

Knowledge retention

This is the biggest practical difference and the one the per-job price does not show.

With per-job, each set of accounts goes to whoever in the provider's pool is free. Next year, it goes to someone else. Nobody remembers that this client's directors' loan account always needs a reconciliation because they pay personal bills through the company. Nobody remembers that the other client changed their year-end. Every year, the work starts from the file, and every year the same queries come back.

With a seat, the same person does the same client's accounts in year two. They remember the directors' loan, and they have last year's working papers, because they wrote them. The second year is faster than the first, and the third is faster still. Your reviewer sees fewer points per job. That is what people mean when they say a seat "learns the practice", and it is worth real hours.

Query handling

Per-job providers handle queries well or badly, but always at arm's length. A query list comes back with the draft, or the job is put on hold while the provider waits for you. Because the preparer has no relationship with you, queries tend to be formal, numerous and slow. Each round trip adds days.

With a seat, the preparer is a person you message. They ask as they go. If the answer is in last year's file, they find it. If it needs the client, they draft the email for your fee-earner to send. Because our team is in Pretoria, one to two hours ahead of the UK, the question and the answer happen in the same working day. The how it works page walks through a typical job.

The quiet months

Here is the honest point in favour of per-job. A practice's year-end and self assessment work is not flat. There is a crush in the months before the January deadline and again around common year-end dates, and there are quiet stretches. With per-job you pay nothing in a quiet month. With a seat, you pay £2,650 whether or not you have 160 hours of work.

How practices handle that: they stop treating the seat as a year-end machine and treat it as a production team. In the quiet months the seat does management accounts, the bookkeeping backlog, clearing the self assessment returns early so January is not a crush, onboarding admin, or the content that never gets written. A Production seat at £1,950 can fill quiet hours with the practice's newsletter and guides, because content fills Production-seat hours rather than being sold separately. The seat is only idle if you let it be.

And there is a trade in the busy months too. Per-job providers are busiest in January and quote longer turnaround times when you most need speed. A seat is yours in January at the same price as August.

Who carries utilisation risk

Per-job: the provider. They have to keep a pool busy, and they price that risk into the per-job rate. You pay a margin for the flexibility of sending nothing.

Seats: you. You commit to 160 hours a month, and it is your job to fill them. In return you get the hours at a lower effective rate. An Accounts seat works out at £16.56 an hour; the offshore hourly market is £8–15 for unreviewed work, and UK outsourcers charge £25–45 an hour. If you can keep the seat busy, you have bought reviewed work at close to the unreviewed offshore rate. If you cannot, you have paid for empty hours.

That is why seat sizes exist. A half seat at 80 hours or a part-time seat at 40 hours is for a practice that cannot yet fill 160. You size to the work you can see, on a rolling monthly contract with one month's notice, and grow when the work grows.

When per-job is genuinely the right answer

• Very low volume. If you have thirty year-ends and forty tax returns, that is perhaps 400 hours a year, and a 40-hour part-time seat would still be half empty. Per-job is cheaper and simpler.
• A one-off backlog. You have bought a block of fees, or a staff member left and sixty sets are late. Send them per-job, clear the backlog, then decide on the long-term model with a clear desk.
• Testing the water. Ten jobs per-job tells you whether outsourcing works for your practice at all, for a few hundred pounds. Do that before committing to any seat, ours included.
• Work with no continuity value. One-off dormant accounts, a single cessation return, a client you are disengaging. Nobody needs to remember them next year.

When seats win

Above about 60 to 80 year-ends with returns alongside, the continuity, query speed and flat price of a seat start to outweigh the flexibility of per-job. By the time you are at the 120 and 180 practice above, one Accounts seat does the work, the reviewer's job gets easier every year, and the cost per hour of finished, reviewed work is below what any UK option can reach. Details on the accounts production page.

Where to start

Put your own year-end and return counts into the capacity calculator. It will tell you the hours and whether they fit a part-time, half or full seat. If the answer is "not enough for a seat", we will say so. Then get in touch.

Published 22 August 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.