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Give me three moves
bookkeeping and accounting

My bookkeeping practice is completely full but I am not making enough money — what is wrong?

Short answer

Almost certainly scope creep on legacy clients rather than underpricing new ones. In most practices the fee was set when the client was smaller, and transaction volume, payroll and extra entities have grown into it without the fee moving. Compare current monthly transaction counts against what the original engagement assumed — if a client has doubled in volume on the same fee, they are now paying roughly half your intended rate, and there are usually three or four of them.

A client who outgrew their fee
Engagement set in 2023: ~180 transactions/month at £250
Effective rate: £1.39 per transaction
Today: ~340 transactions/month, plus payroll, still £250
Effective rate now: £0.74 per transaction

They are paying 53% of the original rate. Restoring it means £465/month, not £250.

This is the most common profitability failure in bookkeeping and it does not look like a pricing problem from the inside. Every client is happy, the work is delivered, the practice is full. The fee schedule is simply three years behind the work.

Quantify it per client rather than in aggregate. Pull the transaction count for the month against the count assumed in the original engagement letter, and add anything that arrived since — payroll, a second entity, VAT registration, a new subsidiary. Each of those was a scope change that most practices absorb silently.

Fixing it does not require a confrontation. The strongest fee conversation in this profession shows the client their own growth: "when we agreed the fee you were at 180 transactions a month, you are now at 340." That is the client's good news and it makes the increase self-evident rather than adversarial.

Give 60 days notice and never raise fees in the middle of a filing period. The practices that lose clients over fees are almost always the ones that raised them at the worst possible moment rather than the ones that raised them at all.

Want this worked out for your business specifically?

Everything above is the general case. Describe your business in one sentence — what you sell, roughly how many customers, roughly what you charge — and you will get three specific moves back, each priced per month with the arithmetic written out so you can substitute your own figures.

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Give me three moves

People also ask this as

  • Why is my accounting practice busy but not profitable?
  • How should I price bookkeeping services per month?
  • How do I raise fees for existing bookkeeping clients?

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Figures are typical ranges for small businesses in the UK, US and Canada, given so you can check them against your own books rather than take them on trust. They are arithmetic on stated assumptions, not a forecast, and not financial advice.