How to Price Accounting Services in a New Firm

New owners usually price by looking sideways: they find out roughly what other local firms charge and position slightly below it. That produces a fee that may not cover the work, because you do not know what their fee includes, what their costs are, or whether they are profitable.

Start instead with three of your own numbers. How many chargeable hours will you realistically sell in a year, allowing for admin, marketing and the tax season ceiling. What the firm costs to run, including a salary for yourself. What margin you want on top. Those give you the revenue per hour the firm needs, and every fixed fee has to clear it against the hours the job actually consumes.

Then track the hours. Not to bill them — to find out whether your fixed fees are right. The most common finding in a first year is that the cheap clients cost more than the expensive ones.

Hourly billing is safe for the firm and uncomfortable for the client. It transfers all uncertainty to the buyer, discourages them from calling you, and penalizes you for getting faster. It remains the right answer for genuinely unbounded work: a messy cleanup where you cannot see the bottom, or a dispute whose length nobody controls.

Fixed fees are better for everything repeatable. The client knows the number, you know the number, and you keep the benefit of improving your process. The requirement is a tight scope, which is why fixed pricing and a proper engagement letter are the same project.

A practical hybrid for new firms: fixed fee for defined recurring work, a stated hourly rate for out-of-scope requests, and a diagnostic or cleanup phase billed separately before you quote the ongoing fee. That last point avoids the classic first-year mistake of quoting a monthly fee before you have seen the books.

Value pricing means setting the fee against the client's outcome rather than your input hours. It works best where the value is legible: an entity restructure, a cost segregation study, an advisory engagement that changes what the owner takes home. It works poorly for compliance work the client sees as a commodity.

It also demands a conversation most technically strong accountants avoid — asking what the problem is costing the client today. Without that conversation, value pricing collapses back into guessing a bigger number. Start with one service where you can articulate the outcome, and keep fixed fees for the rest.

Build the fee from the return rather than from a flat rate. A base fee for the core return, then defined add-ons for each additional schedule, state, rental property, K-1 or brokerage account. Clients accept this readily because the logic is visible and they can see why their neighbor pays less.

Two disciplines protect the margin. Price the disorganized client higher, explicitly, and say why — you are not punishing them, you are pricing the work. And repeat the quote in writing before you start, because a return that gains three states between the quote and the filing is a new engagement.

Reprice annually at re-engagement, in writing, as a normal part of the yearly letter. Firms that raise prices only when they are desperate raise them by a lot, apologetically, at a bad moment, and that is when clients leave.

Expect to lose some clients when you first correct underpricing, and accept it. The clients who leave over a modest increase are usually the ones consuming the most unbilled time.

The agreed fee goes out inside the white-label engagement letter during onboarding, so the price is documented before work starts rather than negotiated after. Online payment collection through Stripe means the client can pay from the same place they approved the fee.

Because work runs as tasks against each client, you can see which clients absorb the most effort and compare that against what they pay. That is the information a repricing conversation needs, and it is the information most firms do not have in year one.

Remindoo is built by a practicing chartered accountant who runs a 40-person accounting firm, so the workflows come from running a practice rather than from a product roadmap.