The price your paying for a service should give you some idea of the service you can expect to receive, and whether that service provider is operating legitimately, in our experience these are industry averages and the service you can expect to go with it:

% based fees, any company operating on a percentage based fee in our opinion should be avoided, they are financially encouraged to increase your repayment and therefore increase their fees, whilst you may initially end up with a large repayment, who knows how that’s been generated and if your asked to repay any amount to HMRC, do you think the company will then refund their percentage based fees!

£50-£100 no support, possibly just fill in a form online or in the post, provide all the information yourself, no professional checks or reviews, this will be simply submitted to HMRC, no aftercare, no phone support, office hours only, its pretty much a copy & paste service and would be better doing it yourself.

£100-£200 office hour support before submission, limited assistance throughout the remainder of the year, will rely on the customer to provide everything required for submission, may well be reviewed before submission, may charge for additional sections such as Employment, dividends, property.

£200-£300 office hours, evenings a weekend customer support, can recover lost information and contacting your employers/contractors for information, reviewing your bank's statements and receipts, full aftercare and year-round assistance, may have their own online portal or provide access to popular accounting software. Tenants references, mortgage applications etc all included.

£300 + generally too much for a CIS self-assessment return, maybe offering larger than average repayments, ask yourself why.

Like all genuine businesses we incur costs such as business insurance, professional subscription fees, staff, premises etc. etc. these costs are reflected in our fees for us to provide you with the service we are proud to offer.

Some companies at the lower end of the price range, may not have these costs to pay again, just ask yourself why.

Useful help pages:

• How customers are exploited

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