An owner gets three quotes. One is 180 a month, one is 340 and one is 520. The business is the same in all three conversations.
She assumes the cheapest is good value and the dearest is taking advantage. In fact the first excludes VAT returns, the second includes them, and the third includes payroll, invoicing and chasing her customers for money.
A worked example
Say a small building firm with two bank accounts, a card, around 220 transactions a month, VAT returns quarterly and four employees.
Basic bookkeeping, reconciling the accounts and categorising transactions at 220 transactions, perhaps 180 a month.
Add quarterly VAT preparation and submission, roughly 60 a month equivalent.
Add payroll for four employees, around 45 a month.
Add raising sales invoices and chasing overdue payments, around 90 a month.
Add a monthly management report and a short call, around 40.
That is 415 a month for the full service and 180 for the basic one, and both are honest quotes for completely different work.
Publish the basis, not just a price
Transaction bands, what is included at each level and what is extra. Owners comparing quotes need to know what they are comparing, and the practice that explains it wins the ones who were confused.
Price on transactions, not on turnover
A business with high turnover and forty transactions is less work than one with low turnover and six hundred. Turnover-based pricing punishes the wrong clients and is hard to defend.
Say what the client must do
Send receipts, use the software, connect the bank feed, respond to queries. A fee assumes a level of cooperation, and stating it prevents the client who costs three times the quoted work.
Charge for chasing separately
Chasing missing paperwork is real time and most practices absorb it silently. Publishing that a well-organised client pays less is both fair and a useful incentive.
Explain what happens if volume changes
Growth, a busy season or a new contract changes the work. Agreeing a review point prevents either side feeling stuck.
Be clear about the year end
Whether annual accounts are included, whether an accountant is separate and how the two work together. Owners frequently assume one fee covers everything.
Offer levels rather than one price
Basic, standard and full, with what each includes. Owners choose a level far more readily than they accept a single number.
Say how queries are handled
An owner wants to know whether asking a question mid-month costs extra. Publishing that a certain amount of contact is included, what falls outside it and how long replies take answers the worry that every email carries a charge, which is the unspoken reason owners stop asking their bookkeeper anything useful.
Catch-up work is priced separately
Backlogs are a different service, which is covered in monthly bookkeeping package questions.
Switching fear affects the decision
It is covered in software and handover questions when switching bookkeepers.
Fixed fees are the wider trend
They are covered in fixed fee questions every accountancy practice hears, and recurring billing behaves as in an AI assistant for a subscription business.
Getting started
Publish your transaction bands, what each level includes and what the client must do, then capture volumes at any hour. SpideyChat for accountants and bookkeepers answers from your published pages, our plans are on the pricing page, and the chatbot ROI calculator works through the numbers.