You are not really paid for the accounts

Ask a firm owner what their clients pay for and you will get a list. Annual accounts. Corporation tax return. Payroll. VAT. Self assessment for the directors.

All true, and all beside the point.

Those are the things you produce. They are not the reason anybody stays with you, and they are not where most of your value sits.

The visible part is the smallest part

Think about the last time a client rang in March with a question that had nothing to do with anything you were preparing. Can I put this through the company. I have been offered a lease, is that sensible. My biggest customer has gone quiet and I am worried.

None of that appears on any invoice. None of it produces a document. And all of it is the reason they have not gone anywhere.

The deliverables are the visible tip. The reassurance is the iceberg.

The same is true of the things they never see. You are their agent with HMRC all year round. You notice the deadline they have forgotten. You are the reason a letter with a coat of arms on it is a mild inconvenience rather than a bad week.

Ask a business owner what they buy from their accountant and very few say "a set of statutory accounts". Most say some version of not having to think about it.

What happens when you only bill the visible part

Two things, and they reinforce each other.

You feel underpaid, without being able to say why. The fee was set against the deliverables, so every quick question sits outside it. You take the call anyway, because you are not going to refuse, but it lands as something being taken rather than something you are paid for. Do that for a few years and it turns into a low background resentment aimed at people who have done nothing wrong.

The client learns that access is free. Not because they are exploiting you. Because you told them so, by never putting it in the price. Nobody values what arrives at no cost, and no one has ever said "actually, you should be charging me for this".

That is the trap. Two reasonable parties, both behaving reasonably, arriving somewhere neither of them wanted.

Charge for the relationship, not the job

The change is smaller than it sounds. It is mostly a change in what the fee is described as covering.

A fee for a job is a fee for a job. Once the job is done, anything else is an extra, and both of you feel it.

A monthly fee for a relationship covers the work and the year. The quarterly filings, yes, but also the questions, the being reachable, the standing agent authority, the fact that somebody is watching. Once that is what the fee is for, a client ringing in March is not eating into your margin. They are using what they bought.

It is worth saying plainly to clients too, not just deciding it internally. "This covers the compliance work, and it covers being able to ring me when something comes up, without watching the clock." Most clients are relieved to hear it, because most of them have wondered whether they are allowed to.

Say it in writing, or it does not count

The other half of this is the engagement letter, and it is the half that gets skipped.

If the monthly fee genuinely covers ongoing access to advice, your continuing role as their agent, and work scheduled through the year, then the letter should say so in those terms. Not as legal cover, though it is that too. As a description of the deal.

It changes what happens when a client leaves mid-year and asks for their money back on the accounts you have not filed yet. But more usefully, it changes what happens in month three, when they are deciding whether ringing you counts as bothering you.

In Power Pricing every proposal is built as a monthly recurring fee, and the letter carries a clause setting out exactly what those payments buy. It is the clause I get asked about most, and the one you will not find in other tools, because I wrote it after having the wrong version of that conversation myself.

The test

Here is a way to check where you currently stand.

Think of your favourite client. Now imagine they rang tomorrow with a question that will take you forty minutes and produce nothing you can file.

If your first thought is that you are glad they called, your pricing is probably right.

If your first thought is that you cannot really charge for that, then you already know which part of your value you are giving away.