The Advisers Who Can’t Price Themselves

Accountants spend their working lives telling business owners to protect margin, review costs and charge for the value they deliver. So why do so many practices still struggle to do the same thing themselves?

A Capium point of view

There is a number that should make any practice owner stop and think.

AAT says it supports more than 6,000 AAT Licensed Accountants and Bookkeepers running their own practices, with average fee income for an AAT Licensed Accountant of £72,000.

Now put that against the cost of running a practice: software, professional memberships, professional indemnity insurance, AML supervision, CPD, filing fees and — perhaps most importantly — the hours that never make it onto an invoice.

Then ask a deceptively simple question:

How was your current pricing actually decided?

For a profession built around financial discipline, the answer is not always as rigorous as you might expect.

Sometimes it is based on what the fee was last year, what competitors appear to charge, what the client will tolerate, or what the practice has always charged.

That approach becomes increasingly difficult to defend when the cost of delivering the work keeps changing.

Part one: The costs you don’t control

Start with the side of the equation you didn’t choose.

The cost of running a UK practice has continued to move.

Companies House fees

Companies House increased a number of fees from 1 February 2026. Digital incorporation increased to £100, while the digital confirmation statement fee increased to £50. The ACSP registration fee is £63.

Whether those increases are passed directly to clients, absorbed into your fees or treated as overhead, they have an impact on the economics of providing company-related services.

The software stack

Software is another obvious example.

Xero’s current UK pricing lists Ignite at £18 a month, Grow at £39, Comprehensive at £55 and Ultimate at £70, excluding VAT. Its plans also include usage limits and optional or additional charges for certain services.

The point isn’t whether any particular supplier’s pricing is reasonable.

The point is that your own pricing model has to keep pace with your cost base.

If the cost of delivering a service changes while the client’s fee remains untouched, the difference comes directly out of margin.

And software isn’t the only cost.

The profession itself

Professional memberships, practising requirements, CPD, AML compliance, insurance and training all form part of the cost of running a professional practice.

None of these costs are particularly surprising. The question is whether they are properly reflected in what you charge.

Suppliers review their prices.

Regulators review their fees.

Professional bodies review theirs.

When did you last review yours?

Part two: What are successful practices doing?

There is evidence that some firms are already responding through their pricing and client relationships.

ICAEW’s 2026 research into the UK mid-tier found that 94% of surveyed firms reported fee growth in their most recent financial year. Increased spend from existing clients was one of the leading contributors, alongside growth in fees from new clients.

That is significant because it points towards something more interesting than simply winning more clients.

Growth can come from getting more value from the relationships you already have.

That might mean additional services, better-defined packages, advisory work, or simply bringing fees into line with the work and value already being delivered.

And this matters particularly for smaller practices.

A practice doesn’t necessarily need hundreds of new clients to improve its financial position. It may need a clearer understanding of:

What each client actually costs to service
What work is included in the current fee
How much unbilled work is being carried
Where scope creep is occurring
Which services are genuinely profitable
Where technology can reduce delivery costs

That brings us to pricing.

Part three: Stop looking for the “right” price

There isn’t necessarily one correct price for a tax return, bookkeeping package or annual accounts job.

There is, however, a more disciplined way of arriving at a price.

A useful framework is:

Floor — What does this client actually cost you?

Start with your fully loaded cost of delivery, including realistic productive hours, supervision and relevant technology costs.

The objective isn’t to sell at cost. It is to understand where the floor sits before profit.

Scope — What exactly are you agreeing to deliver?

What is included?

What isn’t?

What happens when the client sends another company to deal with, adds payroll, misses deadlines or needs work outside the original agreement?

Clear scope protects both the client and the practice.

Load — What additional risk and compliance does the client bring?

AML checks, onboarding, ID verification, MTD requirements, additional reporting and complexity all consume time and resources.

Those costs don’t disappear simply because they aren’t separately itemised.

Lift — What is the service worth to the client?

This is where pricing moves beyond cost.

A client isn’t necessarily buying 10 hours of an accountant’s time. They may be buying certainty, expertise, compliance, decision support and the ability to spend their own time running their business.

The question becomes:

What value does the service create, and how should that be reflected in the fee?

Run the numbers on a real client

Take a hypothetical VAT-registered limited company receiving monthly bookkeeping and year-end accounts.

Suppose the work takes 14 hours a year and your fully loaded cost is £85 an hour.

That’s £1,190 before adding the other costs associated with servicing the client.

Now add the relevant software, compliance and overhead costs.

The point isn’t that every client should be priced using exactly these figures.

The point is that you should know your own figures.

If the client is paying £1,800 because that is what they’ve always paid, you need to know whether that fee still makes commercial sense.

If it doesn’t, the answer isn’t necessarily to lose the client.

It may be to change the scope, change the service, change the price — or understand why you are choosing to retain the work at that level.

And then there’s recovery

Pricing isn’t the only issue.

ICAEW’s guidance on fees and charge-out rates highlights the often-hidden cost of under-recovery. Its example considers a practice generating £400,000 of fees at an 85% recovery rate — meaning a significant amount of work has effectively gone unrecovered.

That’s why practice owners need to look beyond headline fees.

A client paying £2,000 isn’t necessarily a £2,000 client if the practice consistently spends considerably more time delivering the agreed work.

Revenue tells you what you billed. Recovery tells you what you actually earned from the work.

Three questions for your next partners’ meeting

When did you last reprice an existing client?

Not a new client.

Not when they asked for additional work.

When did you proactively review the fee against the work you’re actually delivering today?

Which costs are you absorbing?

Software, filing fees, additional compliance work and other third-party costs can gradually become invisible if they are simply absorbed into the overall fee.

Make sure you know what you are absorbing — and why.

Can you explain your price without talking about hours?

If your explanation starts and ends with “it takes us X hours”, you may be selling the input rather than the outcome.

What does good pricing look like?

There is no single pricing model that works for every practice.

But practices that approach pricing deliberately tend to share some characteristics.

They:

Review fees regularly rather than waiting for a crisis
Define packages and scope clearly
Track profitability and recovery by client
Identify additional work before it becomes free work
Make software and third-party costs visible where appropriate
Price advisory and specialist expertise according to its value
Use technology to reduce the cost of delivering routine work
Have a clear process for communicating price changes

Most importantly, they know why they charge what they charge.

A word about your software supplier

It would be slightly convenient for a software supplier to write an article about pricing without acknowledging that software is part of the equation.

So apply the same test to Capium.

When comparing accounting software, don’t just look at the headline monthly price.

Ask:

What is included?
What is charged separately?
How predictable is the cost as your practice grows?
What happens when clients add services or entities?
How does the platform support MTD?
How much duplication can you remove from your existing workflows?
What does the total cost look like over three years, not three months?

For a practice, software isn’t simply an overhead.

It’s part of the cost of delivering your service — and potentially part of the opportunity to deliver it more efficiently.

Capium brings bookkeeping, accounts production, tax, payroll, practice management and Making Tax Digital capabilities together in one cloud platform, giving practices an alternative to managing multiple disconnected systems.

The objective isn’t simply to reduce the software bill.

It is to understand the total cost of running the practice, and make better decisions about where technology can reduce admin, improve workflows and create capacity.

The real pricing question

The strongest practices in the years ahead won’t necessarily be the ones that increase their fees the most.

They’ll be the ones that understand why they charge what they charge.

They’ll know what each client costs to serve, where their margins are being lost, which services create value and where technology can improve delivery.

And they’ll be able to explain their prices with confidence.

Because if you can help your clients understand the numbers in their business, you should be able to do the same for your own.

Want to take the conversation further?

Pricing is just one part of building a stronger, more sustainable practice. Join Tushir Patel, Co-founder of Capium, and a panel of experienced accountancy practitioners on 23 September at 12pm BST for a practical conversation about winning clients, improving efficiency and growing a practice without simply adding more work.

Register for the webinar →

Capium is a UK cloud accounting platform built for accounting practices, covering bookkeeping, accounts production, tax, payroll, practice management and Making Tax Digital compliance.

The Advisers Who Can’t Price Themselves