What to pay per company

Agreed: £125 per company for a full setup. A full company is of work, so that is an hour — comfortably inside the £20–35 that UK self-employed bookkeepers typically charge, and enough above the floor that it still holds if a company runs long.

For context on how it was set: £100 would have been and £250 would have been — the latter roughly double the market.

Split by job — what each part is worth

The £125 divided across the three jobs in proportion to the hours each takes — about £30 an hour, the middle of the UK range. They are genuinely different work and not every client gets all three.

£50per company

Bookkeeping and compliance

Confirmation statement, accounts position, director record corrected
Government Gateway recovered — the phone routes are the slow part
UTR and VAT position established, auth code requested where missing
Identity and AML documents collected

The skilled half. It is client-facing, it involves HMRC on the phone, and getting it wrong has statutory consequences.

£25per company

Portal — attached and linked

Deploy from the client's own INSTALL.html
Attach it to the company's Google account, never a personal one
Link and prove each part: form submits, calendar holds both statutory dates, suppliers loaded
Live form link placed where it will actually be used

Mostly following a runbook that is already written, which is why it is the cheapest of the three. The 45-minute session with the director sits inside it.

£30per company

Social channels

Handle availability checked across all five before anything is created
YouTube, Google Business Profile, Facebook Page, linked Instagram, X
Every profile filled properly — logo, banner, about text, links
First drafts queued, nothing connected to auto-publish

Five companies do not get this at all — the ones on a live strike-off or with no director. Do not pay for it where it was correctly skipped.

The split adds back to . So £125 flat and the split are the same money — flat is less admin, the split is fairer. Use the split whenever the scope varies: a client who skips social, or one where the portal was already done, should be paid for what was actually delivered.

If the estimate is wrong

Our hours have never been timed against real work. This is what happens to the rate if they are optimistic.

Time the first five properly, then reset. If a full setup is really taking six hours, £125 is an hour and getting close to the floor — and it is far easier to raise a rate you set low than to cut one you set high. Agree now that the rate is reviewed after five companies, so neither side has to reopen it awkwardly later.

The rules that matter more than the number

Pay on confirmed, never on submitted

The dispatch portal has five states and only Done pays — meaning Supreme has checked the evidence. Paying at Submitted removes the only quality control in the system.

Companies House fees never come out of her fee

A confirmation statement is £50. A remediation client carries of fees where a clean one carries . Deduct those and the hardest companies pay her least, which is exactly backwards.

Fix the scope in writing before the first one

"Full setup" has to mean a named list, and the runbooks are that list. Without it every disagreement becomes about whether something was included.

Pay the skipped work honestly

Five companies get no social channels for good reasons. She should not be paid for work correctly not done — and she should not lose out on a company that turned out to need three times the phone calls.

Per company, by condition

Context, not a target. The itemised list values a full setup at to the client, so £125 of labour is about of it. That internal pricing has not been market-tested, so treat the percentage as a sense check rather than something to optimise.