Benchmark for audit fees
charles lambert (CFO, Novella Clinical)
| Jan 3, 2011We are a $100m revenue private company in professional services (revenues contract/project based, no inventory, limited supply chain). I am interested in whether anyone has a benchmark % of revenue range for the audit fee for this kind of company?
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Answers
Company: International Medical Group, Inc.
it has been my experience, that once you arrive in the $50m - $100m revenue range, for a private service oriented company, that your non-Final Four audit fee ranges from .05% to .1%. of course, subsidiary structure, physical locations, geographic dispersement, etc... will all factor in to the audit complexity and cost. also the completeness and level of professionalism within the companies accounting and finance structure will impact this cost too.
hope this is helpful.
Company: Frank, Rimerman + Co, LLP
It should come down to the type of deals you are doing - if you have 10 deals at $10m each your audit fee should be at the lower end of the range than a company with 50 $2m deals especially if many are in progress at year end and not completed - The range listed above of $50k to $100k is about right but that is a huge range and hard to narrow it down without more detail on structure and types of deals.
mrewkiewicz
fr-co [dot] com
if you want to discuss further
Company: in-between
I would agree with Michael above regarding the number of transactions. Certainly makes a difference. If it's not too high you may get towards the lower end of that range, but certainly the geographic area makes a difference as well. May be wise to lock in a rate for a few years, in this economy we see firms underbidding to get the job and then hiking fees afterward to recoup costs.
Company: Novella Clinical
thanks for the responses; useful benchmarks
Company: Tanknology Inc.
One way to manage your costs is we negotiated with our auditor by allowing them to come to office and do preliminary testing work during any of the last two weeks of the year. So if they have audit staff that is slow they can send to our office. If the firm does not take advantage of this we still get the discount. The other thing we did was negotiate with our bank for an April 30 audit date instead of March 31(we are a 12/31 Y/E company) this allow us to further negotiate our fee down with our auditor because they are slammed on 3/31 audit requirements.
Company: The CPA Exchange, Inc.
Please see www.auditorbenchmark.com