For Australian accounting firms
The question is rarely whether to outsource. It is what the per-return price on the invoice does and does not cover, what obligation stays with you either way, and what the alternatives have actually changed since the last time you priced them.
Written by the team behind BeforeMay, which sells one of the alternatives. The last section says so; the rest is written to be useful to somebody who reads it and renews with their provider.
It absorbs volume without a hire. A practice that takes on two hundred extra individual returns in October cannot recruit for October, and a per-return arrangement turns a staffing problem into a variable cost. That is a real answer to a real problem and it is why so many firms use it.
It also handles the awkward middle that software is worst at: a shoebox, a client who answers in fragments, a set of records that needs a person to make sense of before anything can be prepared from them. A preparer can ask a question and change their mind.
And it is elastic in both directions. The month with no work costs nothing, which a salary does not.
None of these is an argument against outsourcing. They are the parts of the arrangement that a per-return price does not move, and they are where the comparison with any alternative is actually decided — so they are worth pricing before you compare two numbers that look comparable.
Somebody in your office assembles what the preparer needs and writes the instructions. On a straightforward individual that is minutes; on a trust with three properties and a part-year rental it is most of an hour, and it is done by whoever knows the client — which is the person whose time you were trying to buy back.
A question asked at 4pm is answered tomorrow. Most returns need at least one, many need three, and each one parks the file. The per-return price is unchanged by this and the season is not: turnaround, not preparation, is usually what decides how many returns a practice can hold.
A file you cannot trace is re-done rather than reviewed. If the working paper does not get you from a figure to the page it came from, the partner reconstructs the work to sign it — which is the expensive half of preparing, arriving at the most expensive moment.
A dedicated preparer is a salary whether or not February has work in it. A per-return arrangement moves that, which is why most firms end up there — but then the price is per return, and the comparison with software is a comparison of two per-return prices.
The pattern is that the invoice covers preparation and the practice keeps everything either side of it. Whether that is a good trade depends almost entirely on how much of the either-side a given file needs, which is why the same arrangement is excellent for one firm's client mix and disappointing for the next one's.
Whoever prepares it, a registered agent reviews and signs it, and the responsibility for what is in the return stays where it was. The TPB’s guidance on outsourcing and offshoring — TPB(GS) 31/2018, which was TPB(PN) 2/2018 until the 2026 renaming — deals with disclosure to the client, supervision, and the security of client information sent to someone else.
The confusion worth clearing up: TPB(GS) 55/2026, the AI guidance, does not address offshoring at all. They are different documents about different questions, and each gets cited at the wrong one. We keep both, with links to the source, on the FAQ — including where the obligation sits between a provider and a practitioner, which is the part most sales conversations are vague about.
The practical consequence is the same for a person and for a piece of software: you have to be able to tell a client who handled their information and where. A provider who cannot answer that in a sentence has not thought about it, and neither has a vendor.
The thing that moved is the round trip. Software answers in minutes rather than overnight, so a question does not park a file — and because both are typically priced per return, the comparison is not a subscription against a salary but two per-return prices with different turnarounds behind them.
The thing that did not move is judgement. A tool does not ask the client why the March statement stops on the eleventh, and it cannot decide a question the law leaves open. Where a file needs somebody to make sense of it before it can be prepared, a person is still the answer, and what this kind of software cannot do is a section of its own on the page about the category.
The honest summary is narrower than either side’s marketing: software has taken the predictable, document-driven preparation and left the rest alone.
Deliberately symmetric — every one of these is as fair to ask a vendor as a provider, and we would answer all five about ourselves.
Ask for the countries, not for a reassurance. Ask whether the people doing the work can download a file, and what happens to a copy when an engagement ends. The answer should be a sentence, not a brochure, and it is the same question whether the other side is a firm or a piece of software.
Eighteen months later somebody asks how a figure was arrived at. Whatever produced the file has to leave a record you can put in front of them — what was read, what was decided, what you changed. A provider that returns a finished spreadsheet with no working has handed you the answer and not the evidence.
The dangerous answer is a plausible number. The useful one is a file that says, in the cell, that the figure is outstanding — and a list you can chase from. Ask to see a completed job where a document was deliberately withheld.
Every arrangement is affordable in February. Price it against the month your volume triples, and ask what the turnaround is in that month rather than in this one.
This is the one nobody puts in a comparison, and it is the one a principal should think hardest about. Whatever removes the junior work — a preparer overseas or a piece of software — removes the apprenticeship with it, and needs a deliberate answer about where judgement comes from instead.
BeforeMay takes the documents for a case, reads them, treats each figure, and builds the working paper the return is signed off from — priced per return, like the invoice you may already be comparing it with. Every figure links back to the page it came from, and a figure no document supports is written as outstanding rather than estimated.
What that changes against an outsourcing arrangement is the second and third costs above: the round trip goes, and the review is a review rather than a reconstruction. It changes the first one less than we would like — somebody still has to get the documents in, which is why chasing them is part of the product rather than an afterthought.
The evaluation we ask people to run is one case: take a return you have already finished, put the same documents in, and compare the working paper with the one you produced. The first three are free.
Yes, and it is common. The TPB has published guidance on it — TPB(GS) 31/2018, which you may know as TPB(PN) 2/2018 before the 2026 renaming — and it sets out what a registered agent has to do about disclosure, supervision and the security of client information. We keep the citation and the plain-English version on the FAQ rather than paraphrasing it here.
No, and it is worth knowing because the two get mixed up. TPB(GS) 55/2026 deals with artificial intelligence and the Code; offshoring is the older guidance above. Anyone citing the AI guidance at you on an offshore question has the wrong document — and the reverse is true too.
We will not quote a figure for what a preparer costs, because we have none we can stand behind. What we can say is that both are usually priced per return, which makes them directly comparable against an invoice you may already receive — and that the parts not on either invoice, listed above, are where the real difference tends to be. Our own prices are on the pricing page and readable without an account.
Yes, in both cases, and neither changes who signs. The relevant question is not whether you review but how long a review takes — which is decided by whether you can get from a figure to its source document without rebuilding the file.
Plenty of firms do, and the split usually falls the same way: software on the high-volume, predictable work, and people on the files that need judgement before they need preparation. Nothing about this page argues for one instrument on every job.
The data-handling answers, with both TPB guidances cited and linked, are on the FAQ. The category itself — the four unrelated products sold as AI tax software, and eight questions that separate them — is on its own page.