How a line gets here. An admin works a task and marks it Submitted. You check the evidence and
confirm it to Done. Only at that point does it become billable — and at the same moment the admin's piece
rate becomes payable. One action closes both sides, so what we charge and what we pay can never drift apart.
What we deliberately do not charge for
Do not quietly start billing these. Correcting a director we recorded wrongly, reconciling the nominee
store, and filing for our own shelf stock are our costs, not a client's. They appear on the invoice as completed
and not charged, which is worth more in goodwill than the fee would be — and billing a client to fix our own
filing error is exactly how a complaint starts.
Margin, honestly
The headline margin figure is not a profit figure, and should not be quoted as one. The cost column counts
only the offshore piece rate for each task. It excludes:
- UK labour — 76 of the tasks need a UK person on a UK phone at roughly £130/day, which is several times the offshore rate for the same task
- Your own time confirming work — every line here had to be checked by someone senior before it could be billed, and that is the real bottleneck once fifteen people are submitting
- Overhead — software, insurance, professional indemnity, and the AML supervision and agent registration the practice still does not hold
Two-thirds of the billable value is the portal, not compliance. Portal setup at £299 across 44 clients is
about of everything on this page. That is a product sale with a deliverable, and
it is the part most likely to be questioned by a client who did not clearly agree to it. Confirm each client
has actually accepted the portal at that price before it goes on an invoice. The compliance work — statements,
Gateway recovery, VAT, UTR — is the part nobody will argue with, because the deadline is a matter of public
record.