A restaurant chain with four branches in Nairobi called us in March wanting a number, not an explanation. They’d been quoted anywhere from KES 60,000 to 350,000 for the same statutory audit by different firms, and nobody had told them why the gap was so wide. The honest answer took about ten minutes, and most of it came down to one fact most business owners in Kenya don’t know: audit fees here aren’t just negotiable guesswork. There’s a real floor, set in law.
The Accountants (Remuneration) Order, 2021 — issued by ICPAK and binding since July 2021 — sets minimum audit fees an accountant is legally allowed to charge, tied to a company’s annual turnover. A business earning under KES 5 million a year has a minimum audit fee of KES 50,000. Between 5 million and 100 million, the floor jumps to 200,000. Above 100 million, it’s a minimum of 1,000,000. Charging below these isn’t a discount — it’s professional misconduct under the Accountants Act, and any firm quoting well under them is either cutting corners or won’t be around long enough to matter.
Anything significantly below these minimums isn’t a bargain. It’s a sign the firm isn’t pricing the audit properly — or isn’t planning to do the work properly either.
Why the restaurant chain’s quotes varied so much
The minimums are a floor, not the actual price most businesses pay. The Order also sets hourly rates by seniority — a partner’s time is billed at roughly KES 14,500 an hour, a manager’s around 2,000, an assistant’s around 500 — and the final invoice depends on how much senior time a job actually needs. A straightforward, single-location business with clean records might only need a manager and an assistant on the file, with the partner spending an hour reviewing before signing. A business like the restaurant chain, with four locations, cash-heavy transactions, and inventory across sites, needs far more senior time: someone has to physically verify stock at each branch, trace cash reconciliations that don’t always tie out cleanly, and exercise judgment on inventory valuation that a junior audit assistant isn’t qualified to make alone.
That’s most of what separates a 60,000-shilling quote from a 350,000-shilling one for what looks, on the surface, like “the same audit.” Number of locations. Whether inventory needs physical counting. Whether revenue involves judgment calls — accrued income, long-term contracts, related-party transactions — or whether it’s simply cash in, cash out. Whether it’s a first-year audit, where the firm has to build an understanding of the business from nothing, or a repeat engagement, where prior-year files already do a lot of that work. And, less discussed but real: firms based outside Nairobi, or with multi-branch clients, add travel and per diem on top of the professional fee — the Order explicitly allows this as a separate, billable cost.
What a business should actually budget
For a small business under the 5-million-shilling turnover band, the realistic starting point is the 50,000 minimum plus VAT and any disbursements — closer to 58,000 to 65,000 once those are added. A mid-sized company in the 5-to-100-million band should expect the 200,000 floor to move upward fairly quickly once multiple locations, inventory, or related-party transactions enter the picture; 250,000 to 400,000 is a realistic working range rather than an exception. Above 100 million in turnover, the 1,000,000 minimum is genuinely a floor — group structures, foreign subsidiaries, or regulated-sector requirements (banks, SACCOs, insurers) push well past it.
The restaurant chain landed at 280,000 once we walked through what the audit actually required — four physical stock counts, cash reconciliation across all branches, and enough partner review time to sign off on inventory judgment calls that couldn’t be delegated. That was neither the cheapest nor the most expensive of their five quotes. It was the one that matched the actual scope of work, which is usually where the right number sits.
The one place we’d tell any business to be genuinely cautious is a quote sitting meaningfully under the ICPAK minimum for their size band. It isn’t a firm being generous. It’s a firm that either doesn’t know the rules, or is planning to spend less time on your audit than the work actually requires.
