A Toolkit note
When to pay a professional
Some of what is on this shelf will get you to a sensible number. None of it will get you to a number that holds up when someone with a stake in the answer disagrees.
I ran a tax practice, so I have been the professional, and I have never been the client who tried to save the fee. I started the firm doing most things in-house, but I made sure I had a good accountant from the outset, and as the business grew and things got more complicated, the only sensible thing was to hand more of it to people who did it for a living. When there were five or six of us the IT was run in-house, with favours from friends who were IT professionals. The best thing I ever did was hand it to a firm that made sure everything worked and grew with us.
Getting the right professional matters as much as getting one. I used specialist corporate lawyers for restructuring and for selling the business, different lawyers for employment law, and different ones again for procurement. Not every lawyer is equal. Specialisms matter.
The test is simple and it has nothing to do with how hard the sum is. Ask who else cares about the answer and what they can do if they do not like it. A valuation for your own planning is a useful afternoon with the tool on this shelf. The same valuation for a sale, a divorce, a share option scheme or a probate is a document the other side's adviser, a tribunal or the Revenue will pull apart, and the figure needs a name behind it that carries weight. The same goes for a risk assessment that an insurer or a regulator will read, and for anything the law says you must report in a prescribed form.
When that test says yes, pay. Go in with the facts gathered and the question written down, because the professional's time is dearest when they are doing your homework, and the ducks on this site are the homework. When the test says no, the shelf is yours, and most days it is enough.