How do accounting practices price their services and create fee proposals?

If you’re an accountant right now, you’ll know this already… your role has definitely grown over the last few years.

It’s not just year-end accounts anymore. Clients want more regular support, more reporting, and help staying on top of what feels like never-ending changes. In the UK, you’ve got things like Director ID checks under ECCTA and Making Tax Digital. In Ireland, it’s ERR, auto-enrolment, and more compliance popping up all the time.

And all of that? It takes time. It takes effort. It adds pressure.

But here’s the bit that doesn’t get said enough, a lot of firms still aren’t charging for it. That extra work just gets absorbed into the day, treated as “part of the service”, and before long, you’re doing far more than you were a few years ago without seeing much of a difference in your revenue.

The problem isn’t the work, it’s the pricing

Most accountants aren’t short of work right now, if anything, they’ve got more than enough. The real challenge is that pricing hasn’t kept pace with how much the role has evolved. A lot of firms are still using the same approach they’ve had for years, whether that’s hourly billing, fixed fees that haven’t been reviewed in a long time, or simply putting it off with the intention of sorting it later.

And let’s be honest, later rarely comes.

What tends to happen instead is that new bits of work get layered in gradually. A bit more support here, an extra submission there, a few more client questions than usual. None of it feels big enough on its own to trigger a pricing conversation, so it just… stays. Until you step back and realise how much has actually changed.

It all adds up, quickly

Take Making Tax Digital as an example. On paper, quarterly submissions don’t sound like a huge shift, but in reality, each one comes with its own cycle of work, reviewing records, chasing clients, resolving queries, getting approvals, and managing deadlines.

Across a full year, that can easily turn into several extra hours per client. Multiply that across your client base and it becomes a significant amount of time, and if that time isn’t being charged for, it’s coming from somewhere else.

Usually your evenings, your weekends, or your margins.

So how are firms pricing their services?

This is where things start to shift.

More and more practices are moving away from “one size fits all” pricing and building something more structured around what they actually deliver. That might be tiered packages, pricing based on transaction volumes, or simply breaking services out more clearly so nothing gets bundled in unnoticed.

It doesn’t need to be complicated, but it does need to reflect reality.

Because once you properly map out what you’re doing for each client, it becomes much easier to spot what’s changed, what’s been added over time, and where you’re undercharging without even realising it.

Why creating fee proposals still feels harder than it should

Even when you know your pricing needs to change, actually turning that into a proposal can feel like a completely separate challenge.

You’re starting from scratch, second-guessing what to include, tweaking wording, adjusting pricing, and it ends up taking far longer than it should. Every proposal feels like a one-off, and there’s no real consistency across clients, which makes the whole process harder to manage than it needs to be.

That’s usually where things start to fall down, because without a clear structure behind it, pricing and proposals stay disconnected, and that’s where mistakes, underpricing, and time loss creep in.

Bringing structure into pricing and proposals

This is usually the point where things start to click into place. When your services, pricing, and proposals are all aligned, the whole process becomes far more straightforward, because you’re no longer starting from scratch each time. Instead, you’re working from a consistent framework that reflects how your practice actually operates, which makes everything feel a lot more joined up.

That’s exactly what BrightPropose By Bright is designed to support. Rather than building proposals manually or relying on old templates, you can create them using structured, purpose-built formats that clearly lay out your services and pricing. It means you can produce professional, consistent proposals much more efficiently, without second-guessing what to include or how to position your fees.

It also helps bring more accuracy into your pricing. Having a clearer way of calculating fees based on the work involved removes a lot of the uncertainty, so you’re not relying on instinct or rough estimates. And once a proposal has been agreed, the process doesn’t stop there, it naturally flows into onboarding, with digital signing and a much smoother transition into delivering the work.

When everything is connected like that, pricing and proposals stop feeling like separate, time-consuming tasks and start to feel like part of one cohesive process.

Clients don’t expect you to work for free

One thing that comes up time and time again is that clients are generally more understanding than we give them credit for. What they don’t like is unclear pricing or unexpected changes, but when you explain what’s involved and why things are evolving, most are perfectly reasonable about it.

In fact, clear pricing often improves the relationship, because expectations are set properly from the start and there’s less room for those slightly awkward conversations later on.

The key is confidence. Not in a pushy way, just being able to explain your pricing clearly without feeling like you need to apologise for it.

A small shift that makes a big difference

This doesn’t need to be a complete overhaul overnight. It can start with something simple, like reviewing a handful of clients and asking yourself whether you’re actually charging for everything you’re doing, or taking one area like MTD and putting a proper structure around it before it quietly becomes unpaid work.

From there, it becomes much easier to carry that structure through into your proposals, which is where everything starts to feel more consistent and manageable as your practice grows.

Final thoughts

The reality is that the role of the accountant isn’t slowing down any time soon, and while that creates more opportunity, it also brings more responsibility and more demand on your time. As services continue to evolve, pricing needs to evolve with them, otherwise the gap between the work you’re doing and what you’re charging will only continue to grow.

Putting structure around both your pricing and your proposals makes a significant difference here, because it gives you a clearer view of the value you’re delivering and a more confident way of communicating that to your clients. It also helps create consistency across your practice, which makes everything easier to manage as you grow.

With the right approach, and the right tools behind you, pricing becomes far less about guesswork and far more about clarity and control. And ultimately, that’s what allows your business to properly reflect the value of the work you’re already doing, without it coming at the expense of your time or your margins.

This content may have been developed with the assistance of AI tools. Content is reviewed by a member of the Bright team before publication. Guidance on legislation can be obtained from your industry body.