A chartered accountant is a professional,holder of the French diploma of chartered accountant, obtained after an 8-year course including 3 years of internship in a firm.

• He is registered with the Order of Chartered Accountants.
• He takes an oath when registering.
• It is subject to a code of ethics and professional standards.
• He is subject to regular checks on his professional activity.
• He is subject to a professional civil insurance obligation.

A chartered accountant is a generalist of yourcompany, a real simplification of administrative complexity. He is the onlyprofessional who can:

• keep, monitor and stop your accounts
• review and appreciate it
• • attest to its regularity and sincerity. Accounting is not his only field ofintervention, he can also accompany you on the following subjects:
• funding assistance
• business valuation
• implementation of management tools, legal secretariat
• establishment of payslips
• legal assignments with works councils
• export advice
• preparation of tax declarations and assistance in the event of a tax audit
• administrative reorganization (IT, personnel management, recruitment)…

Accounting and finance are increasingly outsourced functions. By calling on an external partner, such as a chartered accountant, to manage these different aspects of your company, such as invoicing or cash management, you free up time to better think about your development strategy, and you ensure that things are done according to the rules of the art. Here are some tips for outsourcing your accounting:

• Make a preliminary analysis of the processes used in your company,
• Determinethe tasks to delegate to an accounting firm or to keep in-house,
• Make an analysis of the cost and expectedgains,
• Write a precise mission contract.

The Commercial Code obliges companies to keep accounts, but the documents to be produced for this depend on the legal form of the company. At a minimum, the documents concerned by accounting management are the following:

• A cash journal
• A shopping diary
• A sales journal
• A bank journal
• A journal of miscellaneous operations
• A big book
• An income statement
• A review
• An annex

When a chartered accountant is solicited by acompany, he draws up an engagement letter in which he mentions in particular the mission assigned to him as well as the amount of fees due in return for hiswork (this is what we commonly referred to as an accountant's fee, or price).
There is no framework in terms of amount. The chartered accountant's fees are set freely with his client, taking into account many elements. It could be :

• due diligence to be implemented on the file (work carried out by the accountant andhis collaborators)
• • the volume of invoices to be processed when the accounting entry is provided by the firm
• • the difficulty of the file (the fees must take into account the skills and knowledge required to perform the service)
• the costs incurred by the chartered accountant to carry out the mission
• the reputation of the chartered accountant.

The fees must, in all cases, reflect the valueof the service rendered by the accountant. They must take into account the level of training and experience of the people participating in the mission.T hey can be reassessed each year when they have been indexed to a particular index in the engagement letter.