CPA Tax Preparation Fees Reasonable?

[The Mobile Mustachian]

Hello everyone,

I currently have a local CPA prepare a few tax returns for us, including a joint return with my wife and 2 LLC returns. We are located in the Philadelphia metro area, so prices are slightly cheaper than center city, but the cost of living is somewhat higher than you would find in some other parts of the US. I prepare the ledgers for both LLCs (one using Quicken for our 1 rental property, the other with Excel for a small online retail business since we're recording less than 20 transactions in a year). We take the standard deduction on our joint return and record 4 - 5 stock purchase/sale transactions per year and include the K-1's from the LLCs. The cost breakdown is:

Joint return = $600
LLC (Quicken Ledger) = $600
LLC (Excel Ledger) = $750
Total = $1,950

Are these costs reasonable based on the information provided? Please feel free to ask any questions for clarity. As our bill from the CPA is going to be nearly 2K this year, my Mustachian senses are telling me to seek some wisdom from the community to make sure these costs are in the right ballpark.

Thanks for your assistance!

[jwright]

Ehh; I think they are reasonable maybe a tad high but not outlandishly so.  I'm sure a bunch of mustachian folks will say that they get their returns prepared for $100, but that has not been my experience working at CPA firms.  We charge by the hour and have at least one internal review of the return, usually two. 

You could probably save money and do these yourself, and if you do upgrade your files to QuickBooks (not Quicken).  Then you can print out the financial statements already formatted.  If you are just showing up with a listing of check written, that's annoying and needlessly time consuming for a CPA to categorize and format. 

The 1040 stands out the most to me because that shouldn't have much data entry and most softwares will import related K-1s to the personal return automatically. 

[protostache]

I paid $1,250 for one LLC and our 1040 this year, so I would say that's roughly appropriate. My CPA was pretty explicit that if I can get him a P&L and balance sheet instead of making the firm do data entry, the price would be correspondingly lower (he quoted a range, topping out around $2k if I just sent them receipts and bank statements.

[Mr. Sharma]

The 1040 could probably be brought down $100-$150. The LLC's seem just right.