fair fee for simple S-corp 1120 ?

Initial set-up will take longer, much longer, than entering the few lines of rental income, insurance, interest, and other rental expenses. So someone quoting you will have that in mind (unless they want to give away their time) when a fee is quoted. I'd start out telling you $450+ inclusive of the state return. The exact amount would really depend on how long it took to get things set-up, what other time and resources get used and the apparent risks involved. The second year should be less.

That's a good point on the difference between the initial set-up and subsequent years. I'll keep that in mind when considering quotes. I know you're just providing a number for informational purposes and not really soliciting here, but I gotta say your price feels a bit high.

wrote

A few things to consider:

I haven't seen you or your documents, and that's key. That $450 minimum is what I tell people who call around fee shopping on corporate work. They don't want to come in, no problem, in fact that's best. I have very few corporate returns that fall below that amount, but those are very easy, and they provide me with other tangible benefits, like referals of other business and/or individual returns, or there's other business accounting I'm doing or a whopping individual return attached to the corporate owners return.

I have A list clients, and they don't complain about fees. I've found that those who complain take up the most of my time, ask losts of questions, don't follow my advice, and blame me because of their bad choices.

I rarely take walk-ins. Most new clients come from referals, and most are not shocked by my fees. I get referals from other accountants and CPA's in town, and have CPA's as clients. And yes, I know. I come across a little harsh, sometimes cocky, but I'm not low balling a fee just to get work - don't need to.

I don't look at it the same way I would look at say, hiring a fence painter. If two painters were 100's of dollars apart on their bids, obviously I would take the low bid assuming at the end of the job, the fence would be painted the way I wanted. With an accountant, what you are paying for is 1) expertise to keep you out of trouble with the IRS, and 2) if you ever ARE audited, that your CPA will represent you and stand behind their work even years later.

My CPA costs considerably more than Paul charges, but they have also saved me more than the cost of their fees in deductions I was not aware of, and mistakes I would have made that would have come back to bite me later. They have an excellent track record with audits, and are available to answer questions throughout the year. It doesn't take them a lot of time to prepare my return. We all use Quickbooks and they have a software program that can pretty much spit out a return immediately once the data is plugged in. We spend an afternoon together, while they look at each account and make sure I assigned everything to the right class and that I have documentation to support it. They also help me structure our spending for the upcoming year. Well worth the cost IMO.

Fran (Back to lurking now...)