The more you establish value in Step 1, the easier your job will be in demanding a higher price per month. Whatever structure and pricing you go with, make sure to lay it all out on the table for current and prospective clients. That way, there are no surprise fees, and clients know what to expect the purpose and content of an independent auditors report from you. You may also consider throwing in other costs, like a fee for an initial consult, to your pricing structure.

Productizing Your Services vs. Offering Custom Services

If you provide a price upfront, then you want to make sure that each minute that you spend on the mandate is something that you have explicitly agreed to work on. If not, then you may find yourself in an unprofitable mandate. As such, defining your scope of work becomes incredibly important. If a client takes advantage of multiple services, charge accordingly. You may also want to increase pricing depending on what services are in demand and when they’re being taken advantage of (e.g., last-minute requests). Smaller clients generate less revenue than medium or large clients.

Step 5: Implement Value-Based Pricing

Look at the types of services you offer and compare what you currently charge to others. For one-off tasks like “QuickBooks setup” or “Create annual budget”, set a price to complete that task. Start with a bookkeeping service price list (which is a great excuse to build another spreadsheet) and write out all of the services you provide. I like this method when getting started with a new client. It’s hard to know how much time a job will take you until you’re in it.

Bill pay

This method is less dependent on the unique situation of each and every one of your clients and is more dependent on the pricing that you have established beforehand. You’ll need to set a menu of all of your additional services and then attach a price to each one. In a billable hour approach with per hour pricing, you let the clock run and your price is based on the time you spent. You send out an invoice afterwards and hope that you don’t have to deal with any write-downs. Here, if you go out of scope, well, you keep charging for the time that you spend.

1. If you’re already doing a client’s books, approach them with an offer to build on your role.
2. If done right, value pricing should therefore result in higher margins.
3. Still, from state-to-state in the US, there are significant differences.
4. It’s a silly hangup, but I always want to find a way to skip past my hourly rate or the total cost of my first invoice and get straight to the work.

Understanding and catering to these industry-specific complexities allows you to justify a higher price for your specialized knowledge and the value you bring to the client. Once they accept, if you use Xero or QuickBooks Online for your own firm’s accounting, you can have all of the invoices and payments sync automatically as well. First, you’ll load up your engagement letter into Practice Ignition as a template under the “terms” section.

It allows you to adjust your fees without painting yourself into a corner, which can happen if you provide quotes to clients when you don’t know the details of their business. Value-based pricing means pricing your services upfront based on the perceived value they have to your clients. And with time being the ultimate resource, it’s important to charge clients proportionally to the amount of time you’re dedicating to their services.

Average prices for bookkeeping services: Fast facts

If you skip this step, scope creep will likely become an issue. Value and therefore price is subjective and is different from person to person. There are a lot of aspects you need to be aware of if you’re choosing value pricing. Many of the busiest firms I see are stretched too thin, doing too much for too little pay.