Price the client from the cost to serve them
Fixed-fee bookkeeping and managed services are profitable exactly when the fee was built from the workload: transactions to process, payslips to run, review time, software seats and support load. This page builds that monthly cost line by line at your rates, adds contingency for the month that is never average, floors the price at your minimum monthly fee if you set one, and turns the cost into a monthly price at your target margin, with the per-user price, the annual figure, the one-time onboarding price and the first-year total shown beside it. Use it for a bookkeeping client, a managed IT client, or any retainer whose scope can be counted.
Recurring workload
Users, software and flat monthly costs
Onboarding (one-time)
Pricing
Disclaimer: This calculator gives estimates for general information only. It is not financial, medical or other professional advice. Prices built here depend on your own costs and workload measures; the binding figures are those in the engagement letter or service agreement you sign with the client.
What this calculator does
It prices a recurring service engagement from the bottom up. The monthly cost to serve is assembled from countable workload: transactions or tickets times minutes times a loaded hourly rate; payroll employees or supported seats at a per-head monthly cost; senior review and account management hours at their own rate, because an hour of review does not cost what an hour of processing costs. Software is counted per user where licences are per user and flat where the platform is shared. Onboarding is costed once, separately, because folding setup into the monthly fee hides it from both parties. Contingency covers the honest fact that transaction volumes and ticket loads spike; the margin then converts cost into price (dividing by one minus the margin, never multiplying by a markup in disguise); a minimum monthly price floors small engagements; and the results translate the monthly price into the dialects clients actually buy in: per user per month, per year, and the first-year total with onboarding included.
How to use it
- Count the workload, do not guess the fee. Transactions live in the client’s bank feed and prior months; tickets live in the helpdesk. Three months of real counts, averaged, beat any package guess, and the contingency then covers the variance instead of the whole estimate being variance.
- Minutes per item is the number that decides everything. Time a sample honestly, including the queries, corrections and filing around each transaction, not just the keying. A bookkeeping engagement priced at 1.2 minutes per transaction and delivered at 2.5 is not a pricing error clients made; it is a measurement the firm skipped.
- Loaded rates, never pay rates. The hourly cost of staff is wages plus payroll taxes, benefits, software, supervision and the non-billable share of their week. Pricing from the pay rate is how busy firms lose money politely, month after month, at full capacity.
- The minimum fee is a scope decision. Every client costs a fixed amount to exist: onboarding amortised, software minimums, a named contact, compliance. The floor price exists so small clients are either priced to that reality or knowingly carried as a favour, and the results flag when the floor, rather than the margin, set the price.
- Onboarding is priced, not absorbed. Setup priced at the same margin and shown apart from the monthly fee lets the client see it, lets the firm waive it deliberately in negotiation instead of accidentally, and makes the first-year total honest.
How it is calculated
- Processing labour = transactions x minutes each / 60 x loaded hourly rate. Payroll or seats = count x cost per head per month. Review = hours x review rate. Software = users x licence cost per user. Platform and other costs enter flat.
- Monthly cost = the sum of those lines, each rounded to cents. Contingency = your % once on the monthly cost. Cost to serve = monthly cost + contingency.
- Monthly price = cost to serve / (1 minus margin %), unless a minimum monthly price is entered and is higher, in which case the minimum is the price and the results state that the minimum monthly price applied. Per user = monthly price / users. Annual = monthly price x 12. Setup cost = setup hours x setup rate; setup price = setup cost at the same margin. First-year total = setup price + annual. Range = monthly price less and plus your percentage.
Worked examples
A bookkeeping client, priced from workload. Illustrative figures: 850 transactions a month at 1.2 minutes each is 17.00 hours, at a $38 loaded rate, $646.00. Payroll for 14 employees at $6.50 a head is $91.00. Review and account management, 1.5 hours at $75, is $112.50. Software for 6 users at $14 is $84.00, and the platform share is $49. Monthly cost $982.50; contingency at 5% adds $49.13, giving a cost to serve of $1,031.63. At a 30% margin the monthly price is $1,473.76, which is $245.63 per user and $17,685.12 a year. Onboarding of 6 hours at $60 costs $360.00 and prices at $514.29, making the first-year total $18,199.41.
Why the floor exists. A tidy micro-client whose lines total $49 a month prices, at the same 30% margin, to $70.00, below the cost of the meetings about the fee. Against a $199 minimum monthly price, the price becomes the floor itself: $199.00 a month, $2,388.00 a year, and the results state that the minimum set the price. Floors are where small-client profitability is decided, in firms of every size.
The same page, an IT support client. Nothing on the form is bookkeeping-specific below the labels: tickets replace transactions, supported seats replace payroll employees, per-user licences are the security and monitoring stack, and review hours are the account manager’s. Managed service pricing fails in the same place bookkeeping pricing fails, in uncounted workload priced from habit, and the antidote is the same arithmetic.
Reading your results
Read the monthly cost before the price: if one line dominates (usually processing labour or per-user software), that line is where scope conversations and automation both pay. Then read the per-user figure against how the client will hear the quote; per-user pricing is legible to buyers, which is its virtue, but it divorces the fee from transaction volume, which is its risk when volumes grow inside a fixed headcount. Finally, compare the first-year total with the annual figure: the gap is onboarding, and a client who balks at it is telling you they expect the setup to be free, which is a negotiation to have in words, not to lose silently in the monthly fee.
Limitations
- Workload averages flatten real months. Year-ends, tax seasons and incident storms do not arrive evenly. Contingency and a scope clause in the agreement carry what an average cannot; this page prices the average honestly and labels the rest as risk, not as cost.
- Scope creep is not in any field. The extra report, the extra entity, the weekend ticket: retainers die by additions nobody re-priced. The calculator prices the scope entered; policing the boundary is a process, and re-running this page when scope changes is the cheapest version of it.
- Rates and burden are the firm’s own homework. Loaded rates, licence costs and platform shares come from your accounts. The page will faithfully price a wrong rate into a wrong fee, which is why the downloadable sheet records every input used.
- Tax and regulatory work may be separately priced. Filings, audits support and regulated advice often sit outside a bookkeeping or support retainer by design. If they are inside yours, their hours belong in the review lines at review rates, not wished into the processing minutes.
Frequently asked questions
How should a bookkeeping firm price a monthly client?
From the cost to serve: count the monthly transactions and the minutes each truly takes, price that time at a loaded rate, add payroll per head, senior review time, software per user and platform costs, add contingency, and divide by one minus the target margin. On this page’s example, $982.50 of monthly cost becomes a $1,473.76 monthly price at a 30% margin. Pricing from a competitor’s package or a round number skips every step that decides whether the client is profitable.
What is the difference between margin and markup in service pricing?
Margin is profit as a share of the price; markup is profit as a share of the cost. A 30% margin divides the cost by 0.70; a 30% markup multiplies it by 1.30, which is a lower price delivering a 23% margin. Firms that think they price at margin and actually price at markup donate the difference on every invoice. This page prices at margin and says so on the form.
Why charge onboarding separately?
Because setup is real, one-time work: chart cleanup, system access, historical data, documentation, tooling deployment. Charged separately at the same margin, it is visible, negotiable and finished; folded into the monthly fee, it is invisible, resented at renewal and still owed. The first-year total in the results keeps both views in front of both parties.
When should a minimum monthly fee apply?
When the priced fee falls below the cost of having the client at all: minimum software charges, a named contact’s time, compliance and the meetings. The floor on this page applies to the price itself and is flagged in the results when it binds, so a small client’s fee is a deliberate decision rather than an arithmetic accident discovered at year-end.
Related calculators
Method: monthly cost to serve built from counted workload at entered loaded rates, contingency once, price derived at the entered margin with an optional minimum monthly price, exactly as defined on this page. Last reviewed: 13 October 2026.