Why you will not find hourly billing in here

Power Pricing is not really another piece of software. It is a philosophy that happens to have a login screen.

It comes out of years of learning value pricing, implementing it in my own firm, and then teaching hundreds of accountants how to move away from the billable hour. Which is why there are things you will not find in it.

No hourly rate calculator. No time-based pricing. Not now, and not ever.

Flexibility, or a lack of conviction

Most pricing software gives you every option. Hourly, fixed, value-based, some blend of the three, whatever you feel like using on the day.

That gets called flexibility. I would call it something else.

They do not want to take a stand, so they build software that lets you keep doing exactly what you have always done.

It is an entirely rational commercial decision on their part. Every feature you might want is a reason not to say no to them. But a tool that accommodates every pricing model has, by definition, no view about which one is right, and a tool with no view cannot help you change.

Power Pricing is opinionated on purpose. If you are looking for something that will help you keep billing by the hour, this is not it, and I would rather tell you that on this page than have you find out in week two.

What I am actually not willing to build

I am not interested in building software that keeps the worst pricing model in professional services alive.

Billing by the hour does three things to a firm, and none of them are good. It caps what you can earn at the number of hours you are awake. It punishes you for getting faster, which is the opposite of what every other business rewards. And it teaches the client that what they are buying is your time, which means every conversation about fees becomes a conversation about how long something took.

Your time is not your value. What you are actually paid for is the transformation, the problems you take off somebody's desk, the risk you make go away, and the things you spot that they would not have.

None of that is measured in hours. So none of it should be priced in hours.

Guardrails beat options

This next part comes from teaching it rather than theorising about it.

Most accountants do not need more options. They know roughly what they should be doing. What defeats them is the Friday afternoon, the client they like, the quote that feels a bit high when they say it out loud, and the quiet slide back into what is comfortable.

They need a system that will not let them undercharge.

That is what the constraints in this software are for. A minimum fee you cannot accidentally quote below. Revenue bands that price a bigger client higher without you having to justify it in the moment. Scope questions that put the reason for the fee in front of the client in their own words. Three options rather than one, so the conversation stops being about whether your price is too high.

Every one of those is a decision taken once, calmly, at your desk, so that it does not have to be taken again in a meeting when you want somebody to like you.

Doing it wrong should be harder than doing it right. That is the whole design principle.

Yes, this is deliberately limiting

I am aware of what I am doing here. I am narrowing the market on purpose and turning away firms who are not ready, which is not what you are supposed to do with a software business.

But I have seen what happens when a firm genuinely commits to value pricing rather than dabbling. Fees go up substantially without clients leaving. Hours come down. The client base improves, because pricing properly filters for people who want an accountant rather than the cheapest accountant.

That only happens with commitment. It does not happen while you are hedging, keeping one foot in the old model, telling yourself you will price on value for the new clients and leave the existing ones alone.

Power Pricing will not let you hedge. That is the point of it.

The objection I hear most

"But some of my clients really do need hourly billing."

I understand why it feels that way, and I would gently suggest it is the strongest argument for the opposite conclusion.

Almost nobody wants to buy hours. What clients want is certainty about what something will cost, which hourly billing is uniquely bad at providing. When a client asks for an hourly rate, what they are usually asking for is protection from an open-ended bill. There are far better ways to give them that, and all of them start with agreeing a price in advance.

If a piece of work is genuinely unknowable in scope, price the part you can define, and agree what happens if it grows. That is not hourly billing. That is scoping properly and saying so.

So who is this for

Accountants who are serious about value pricing rather than curious about it. Firms ready to stop competing on price, stop leaving money on the table, and stop justifying fees with a timesheet.

If that is not you yet, there are plenty of tools that will let you price however you like, and no hard feelings. This one has a view, and the view is not going to change.

It is the hill I am willing to die on.