A £700k firm moving from hourly billing to Power Pricing

The firm: owner-managed practice in Truro. Nine staff, around £700k turnover, growing about 10% a year. Priced by the hour since it was founded. Moved to fixed fees in January 2026.

He did not set out to run an accountancy firm. He is a maths graduate who was heading for the actuarial profession, taught A-level maths for a while, disliked it enough to look for something else, and ended up taking over the practice he had joined as a trainee three years earlier.

What he inherited came with the building: legacy desktop software, paper files, and hourly billing. Then COVID arrived, followed by an anti-money-laundering compliance visit inside the same twelve months. The firm came through both, kept its staff and kept its clients, and has grown steadily since. But the pricing never changed, because there was never a quiet month in which to change it.

The decision

In January he and his business partner decided to stop.

His reasoning was not really about fees. It was about what a client is actually buying:

"No one gives a damn how much time it takes me. They just want to know what am I getting, are you going to be able to do this, can it be done, what value are you at?"

There was a second reason, and it is the one more firms will run into over the next couple of years. If AI makes you meaningfully faster at the same work, hourly billing quietly turns every efficiency gain into a pay cut. Getting better at your job should not reduce your invoice.

The hard part was not the decision

Deciding to price differently takes an afternoon. Doing it across an existing book is the part that stalls firms, and it stalled him for two specific reasons.

Consistency. Once you are not counting hours, something else has to produce the number, and it has to produce the same number on a Friday afternoon as it would on a Monday morning. Otherwise you are not value pricing, you are guessing with more confidence.

Timing. This is the one that catches everybody, and it is the reason his favourite feature is not the one we would have guessed.

Most of the work in his firm lands at the year end. So when a client moves onto a monthly fee part-way through their year, what exactly are they paying for in those first few months? They are paying monthly towards a set of accounts covering a period they were not yet a client for.

"I like the way it does the alignment fee. I was trying to work out timing-wise, a lot of our job is at the end of the year, and it was a case of how is this going to fit in. That's helped quite a bit."

The alignment fee closes that gap on its own. You put in the year end, and the quote covers the months between the client starting and their next year end, so nobody is short-changed and nobody has an awkward conversation in month three.

It is a small piece of arithmetic. It is also the thing that stops a mid-year transition from being a fresh argument every single time.

How he uses it

The pricing screen produces the number. The engagement letter and the service schedules come out with it, saying what the firm will do and what the client needs to do, so the scope is written down at the moment it is agreed rather than reconstructed from memory a year later.

He also uses the pipeline board to see where everyone is, with the columns set up to match how his firm actually works rather than how a piece of software thinks it should.

"I really like it. I think it's simple."

That word comes up a lot with firms who have been through a failed software migration, and he has been through one. Simple is not a small compliment from someone in that position.

Where he is now

Thirty-four proposals out. Eleven signed.

New prospects are not offered the old model at all:

"There's no point going onto an old hourly thing when I don't want to be doing that any more."

And there is a target attached to it. Five client managers, five clients each on the new model by the end of September. The client managers pick which of their clients go first, starting with the ones they enjoy working with, so the team learns the new way of working on the relationships most likely to go well.

That is a better transition plan than most firms have. It is sequenced, it has a date, and it does not depend on the owner personally doing all of it.

The honest bit

He has not used three-option pricing yet. His words were that he is a bit scared of it, which is the most common reason firms leave it switched off, and a fair one. Presenting three prices changes the conversation from yes or no to which one, and that is a different meeting to run. It is there when he wants it.

He is also still working out the internal half of the change: once a client is on a fixed-fee agreement, how does their client manager know at a glance what was promised, and how does the firm stay proactive rather than reactive. That is a practice management question rather than a pricing one, and it is what he is solving next.

Which is roughly the right order to solve them in. You cannot systematise the delivery of an agreement you have not written down yet.

If you are on the same road, do not start with the whole book. Take the next client who comes up for renewal, price them properly, put a date on the rest the way he has, and let the first signed one make the argument for you.