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Hello. Hello. Hello. Welcome, everyone. Thank you, everyone, for joining us today for our what are others charging twenty twenty six benchmark insights session. As we kinda give everyone a few moments to join in, I would love to hear from everyone. Hop over into the attendee chat. Let me know where you're joining from. I'm, I'm calling in from from Toronto, Ontario right now. See who we got here. Look at this. Yeah. All over. See some CTs in the house. Mumbai. Awesome. Well, let me start by introducing myself. My name is Evan Benson. I am a key account manager here at Ignition. I'm gonna be the moderator for today's session. At Ignition, I work every day directly with accounting, tax, and other professional services businesses as they approach the challenge and opportunity of building processes for onboarding clients, implementing tools, and extra relevant for today, the approach to the task of pricing client engagements. Throughout this whole session today, feel free to add comments and questions into the chat or use the q and a function on the side if you have any questions that you'd like addressed. If possible, we'll try and answer all the questions live, or we'll save some for extra time at the end. Or if necessary, we can always follow-up with you after the session. Also of note, today's webinar is being recorded and will be shared out later this week. So here's a little bit about what to expect from today's webinar. Here's the agenda. So what we'll be covering, we're gonna be covering some key highlights and findings from the newest edition of our US accounting and tax pricing benchmark report. We're gonna do a deep dive into the pricing on a few of those particular categories in accounting and tax, including some commentary, thoughts, insights from our expert panel. Gonna share a number of resources, tools, and recommendations. And as well, we'll run through a quick little demo of Ignition so you can see where Ignition fits into this entire exciting topic. For those of you who may be new to Ignition, we help accounting firms streamline their entire client journey from proposal through payment. More than eight thousand service based businesses use Ignition to automate proposals, engagement letters, billing, collections, renewals, and now increasingly pricing decisions. You'll see examples throughout today's session of how firms are using technology to support more mature pricing strategies. One thing we consistently see here at Ignition is, that pricing isn't a standalone activity. Pricing impacts every stage of the client life cycle from how you package your services initially to how you collect your payments, how you renew your agreements, and how you handle out of scope work. The firms with the strongest pricing outcomes typically have repeatable processes around all parts of these stages. Ignition supports you with a full platform of tools designed to unlock efficiency and optimize revenue for the entire client life cycle from qualifying new leads and prospects, getting proposals, engagement letters signed, collecting and automating payments, all the way through to renewals and reengagement and everything in between. So before I introduce the panel for today, we're gonna launch our first poll to make sure we tap into the primary reason why folks are here today. So we'd love to hear a little bit about what brings you to the webinar today. Awesome. See a few different answers across the board. Awesome. I'm excited to be joined by two people who have spent years helping firms improve profitability and pricing. Ryan Lozanis, founder and CEO of FutureFirm, and Don Brolin, CPA, CFE, and CEO of Powerful Accounting. Both contributed expert commentary to this year's report and bring very different and complementary perspectives to the insights we're we're gonna look at today. Brian, why don't you tell us a little bit about FutureFirm and the work that you're doing with firms today? Alright. Thank you very much, Evan, and thanks to Ignition for having me. Nice to be here with you as well, Don, and everyone else that joined today. So my name is Ryan Lozanis. I'm a CPA, born and raised in Montreal, Canada, and I started a firm called Zen Accounting in twenty thirteen. Took it from scratch to sale in just five years. And in twenty eighteen, I started FutureFirm to be the resource I wish I always had when I was growing my firm to avoid all these costly pitfalls and mistakes I made, especially in the area of pricing and packaging. And, today, we educate over six hundred firms from around the world inside our future firm accelerate coaching program to help them unlock more freedom and growth in their business. And, yeah, I'm very happy to be with you all here today. Awesome. Awesome. Thanks, Ryan. Really excited to have you on board today. Now quick question for Dawn. Dawn, can you tell us a little bit about your firm and really why pricing remains such an important topic for practitioners. Yeah. Sure. So I'm Dawn Brolin with Powerful Accounting Inc. Out of Wyndham, Connecticut. Been in business for twenty eight years. Like Ryan, fell all over myself and made more mistakes than I can even possibly count on one, I don't know, seventeen thousand hands. But but we we focus I'm still practicing, so I'm still working on tax returns. We do some bookkeeping. I'm very passionate around tax tax resolution, so helping people out of problems, is really fun for me. We have five staff members in total, so we're a fairly small firm doing around eight hundred thousand dollars in revenue, which I don't wanna ruin all the fun numbers that we're gonna throw out to people today. But, you know, I realized and and, like, Brian, really priced terribly for the first twenty three years. That's probably what I'm gonna know, I'm just self self transparent. But, also, like, Ryan trying to help firms, you know, level set their practices, and I work with with firms to to try to help them move forward. I do something called reassess your success and, you know, try to figure out what's what's missing in your formula that's not allowing you to thrive in in in your practice. So I'm really excited to be here. Ryan's a legend. Evan's just super intelligent, so I'll be bringing up the rear as the anchorwoman and, and hoping I can give some nuggets to help all y'all, like, get yourselves get your stuff settled. Like, get it right. Awesome. Awesome. Thanks, Dawn. Yeah. We're excited. Got a good team here today, so really excited to dive into everything. So that takes us to that, the entire reason why we're here today, which is our twenty twenty six edition of our pricing benchmark survey report. At Aggression, we're on a mission to take the guesswork out of pricing, helping professional service firms price with confidence and clarity. And that's why we've invested in creating these in-depth pricing reports for industries like accounting and other professional services, trying to give you the insights you need to set the right price, win more business, maximize your revenue. The new report is gonna be sent out to everyone's email, next week when it officially launches, so you'll get a deep dive into all the details and insights. Today, we're gonna share an exclusive reveal of some of this year's data and findings. Three years ago, we first launched our our did our first annual benchmark pricing survey report, and so this is the, know, third edition. This year's report includes responses from more than three hundred and sixty accounting firms across the US, both Ignition customers and noncustomers, and goes beyond pricing benchmarks into confidence, profitability, client resistance, and pricing behavior. Every year, we kind of update the questions based on the trends we see in the industry. To bring you this report, so, again, we reached out to a significant group of US based accounting professionals this past May. Our mission was to capture a clear picture of the industry trends and cover price benchmarks and some for some of the most common tax and accounting services. The insights you'll see today come from the firm owners, partners, key decision makers in those practices across the country, and it's really best to be used as a real life, real snapshot on how your peers are pricing, operating, and navigating the market. I think you'll find the results both surprising, useful, and probably reassuring in some places. A quick look at who participated. We surveyed firms, again, across all every major US region and a broad range of revenue bands as well in terms of size of business. Most respondents were small to midsized firms, so hopefully, data is highly relevant to the majority of the firms that are joining us here today. With that, I'll jump into our second poll, and this is kind of a nice kickoff for our conversation, but would love to know, is your firm planning to raise prices in twenty twenty And if so, what percentage are you looking at? Well, I and, Evan, I love to always chime in when we're doing the polling questions. For those who are not sure yet, I'm hoping by the end of this webinar that you will be moving to the yes more than ten percent. That's that's the goal right there to to always increase prices because your value increases every year. You learn things every year. You know, you're becoming so much more you know, you're coming to things like this, and you're learning. So I would expect to see I wanna get everybody up at that yes more than ten percent. Yes. Definitely. We're trying to push everyone up. You're you're swinging the results here, Don. Come on. Let's go. Come on. Can we do it? Yeah, Don. We can't change everyone's opinions just yet. We gotta show them stuff first. We'll get there. Awesome. So so what did we find in the survey related to this? When we asked firms about their plans for next year, a majority of us told us that they are gearing up for price increases, most of which in the five to ten percent range, which kinda matches, I think, with the poll we just, answered here today. In fact, about seventy seven percent of firms plan to raise their prices this year. Not surprising. I think that's what everyone should be doing. Eighty six percent of our surveyors reported confidence in their pricing strategy. That is fantastic. I love to hear that. However, one thing really jumped out to us is that fear of losing clients remains the biggest reason firms hesitate to increase fees. Ryan, does that surprise you that firms are confident but still hesitant to raise prices? I don't know. That eighty six percent number kinda sticks out. I don't know what you think there, Don, but eighty six percent are somewhat are very confident in their current approach. And, usually, I see confidence as an issue when it comes to pricing, especially increasing pricing. And and, definitely, a large chunk of them are nervous to increase prices to because they think they're gonna lose clients. Reality is that when you increase prices by five to ten percent, like most people I think in this in this call today, in this webinar today would say that they're not. People aren't leaving at for those types of price increases. So it means we haven't hit the we haven't hit that inflection point yet. So we're trying to see where the the where the friction results. Like, if you increase your prices by ten percent and everybody says yes, it means we probably left some money on the table. So the eighty six percent number stands out to me. And, also, the, within expectations, the five to ten percent, that's that's what we typically see for a typical price increase at a firm. Definitely. Definitely. And now question for Don. What do you think, firms get wrong when they think about client pushback when it comes to price increases? Yeah. You know, it's it I would my whole thing is if you keep getting yeses, you're not pricing high enough. So if you're yes, yes, yes over time, you're confident because you're getting yeses. You're not confident because of your pricing. And that's, I think, a difference that I would love to just call out. And, definitely, I see it all the time just like Ryan. We see people you know, I don't wanna lose clients. What if I lose clients? Well, what if you doubled your revenue and had half the clients? Would you be happy? That's always what I like to ask people. Now, I mean, that's a little bit of an outrageous statement to say, I doubled my prices. Are you crazy? Which I am. But in a way that I see if you're confident because you're getting clients, that's different than confident in your pricing. So I wanna point that out. I I'm not surprised by that, but I think at the same time, you know, we we're good. I I think we're gonna help some people today. That's what I know for sure. One hundred percent. Yeah. I think some of the people I've worked with Don and and Ryan that are the most confident with their pricing often have the biggest opportunities left on the table. Yeah. Alright. So let's dive a bit deeper into some of the specific highlights from the survey, and let's start by taking a look at the world of tax preparation services. So one continued trend we've seen is the decline of hourly billing. So it's not too surprising. I think most firms at this point know that there are better ways to do their pricing. Really, only about five percent of the people we surveyed use hourly pricing for those tax preparation. I know some firms that say they do hourly pricing when talking to customers, but in reality, they don't actually do that. They're making adjustments to the price they want to, which is really value pricing. Question for Don. Are we finally reaching a point where hourly billing is becoming truly the exception and not the norm? Yes. I think we're getting there, but I'm I'm still so sad for those that are actually hourly billing for tax returns. If I'm really good good at a tax return and I can get an s corp return done in an hour, that doesn't mean I should be charging five hundred bucks for it. You know, so many billing rates, you know, people don't even there's some people who don't even charge five hundred dollars for their billing rates. So they're they're they're absolutely leaving so much money on the table. The value of me putting together an s corp tax return because I'm good at it doesn't shouldn't I shouldn't be punished for that, for the for my ability to do things faster. We talk a lot about AI, and we're I know we're gonna touch on some of that too. But if you think about how AI is gonna make our jobs easier, they're gonna make them easier from a perspective us doing more valued work. And so just because we utilize AI to make things go faster for us and more efficient doesn't mean that that our expertise isn't just as critical. It is actually maybe even more critical when it comes to AI because at the end of the day, you know what? We still have to look at stuff with AI. We still have to use our brains. So I'm disappointed that there's still people I I'm just mind blown. I've never charged by the hour for tax returns, but I'm I am happy to see that the majority of people have moved over to my s corp returns are twenty five hundred dollars. I don't care if it takes me an hour. I don't care if it takes me ten hours. That's the value of what I'm gonna give you at that rate. One hundred percent. Can't agree with you more. Now jumping into, you know, the kind of more structure of when the fees are actually collected, what's interesting here is that, you know, that pricing maturity doesn't always translate into payment maturity. So still from our survey, like, half of firms collect payment entirely after completing the work. Don, you've been pretty vocal about collecting payments much earlier in the process. So, like, why do firms still struggle with this? Yeah. I I think that it's it's what how it's always been. I think it's that whole this is how we've always done it type of conversation. And I think as we learn and grow and educate ourselves in what we're doing and people are catching on to it, I think we're gonna see that change. I think we're gonna see that over time, but I think it's a lot of firms I don't know if Ryan probably sees this too, stuck in that the way we've always done it. And I think if we can get people to and I'm always about changing your mindset. I tell people you're gonna change your business model. That's that's how you're gonna sell it to your client. I changed the way I run my business just like I advise you to change the way you do your business. And so I think that conversation makes more sense to people as as we move forward. Definitely. And when I look at this stat, some people might look at this fifty one percent. I'm looking at the other bottom half that is the other fifty percent. And so if there's an opportunity, clearly, firms are doing it where they're taking whether that's entirely a hundred percent upfront or even just taking deposits to make sure that they're in a good place going forward. Right? Like, you know, a lot of firms are are definitely doing that. In terms of kind of the actual, you know, what the firms are actually charging, so for a basic individual tax return, market's pretty concentrated around that four hundred to eight hundred dollars for basic individual returns, but we're definitely seeing firms successfully push well beyond a thousand dollars when they're positioned really around expertise rather than, you know, just basic volume. So, Ryan, what separates the firms charging premium fees from everyone else? I don't think it's a lot, actually. I think it's what Don kind of mentioned earlier. It's it's all mindset. Right? If we're just talking basic individual tack, the question is, what do you charge for a basic return? They're not saying for a full package of tax services. They're saying what are you doing for a basic return? And some firms are how are some firms charging a thousand bucks and others are charging two hundred dollars? It's all mindset. It's all confidence. Now it's not always easy to generate that confidence, but what if we just tried it with a couple new clients and said this is what our price is? What if we just tried it? And once you see that it's possible, the mindset switches. That's all we need to do is just see that it's possible. Just try it. What's the worst thing that could happen if a new client came to you and said, our minimum price is a thousand bucks for a basic return? All you can do is try and see what happens because, again, I don't think they're doing anything different here. They're just they're just their mindset is different. A hundred percent. Now for looking at at business returns, the benchmark obviously shifts quite a bit. More than half of firms charge between thousand, two thousand dollars annually. Dawn, when when firms see these benchmarks and maybe identify that they're below market, like, what would be the first step for them? Well, for me, the way I kind of shifted the way I was doing things, obviously, a lot of people know I do relationship pricing, subscription pricing. So we we wrap that into the return. But when we're talking about just a business return and we've done some of them where we're just doing the business return. We're not doing tax planning like Ryan said, the basics. I went to them and I said, listen. I I'm changing my business model. This is how I wanna operate my firm. You may not wanna get into subscription pricing, and I had a few people who were like that. And I said, not a problem. You're going to pay a premium then. So I I was very diligent about having conversations with those business clients because in most case well, in all cases, I talked to the ones I really wanted to keep because I saw value in what I could do for them. So, you know, I think sometimes we have to take a step back and say, alright. I know I need to increase my prices. Maybe I'm gonna increase by three hundred dollars this year. Now if you're charging eight hundred dollars for a s corp tax return, you know, to jump over, you might wanna go to twelve fifty. You might wanna just get yourself over that thousand dollar mark. And then the next year, you're gonna go up again. But I found, for me, the conversations with the clients were the home run for me because I took the time. I invested the time in those clients and said, listen. You mean something to me. Like, I really enjoy working with you, but I'm changing my business model. I'm changing my pricing. You know? And and so this is what I need to do. So it's it's really up to you, but I think I truly believe in these kind of situations where we've changed our mindset, we're changing our business model, you know, our our costs have gone up. Being upfront with them and telling them I'm changing this for for my firm so I can do give you a better service. Those conversations are invaluable. And so, you know, go ahead, Ryan. No. No. And I I wanted to add to something you said before earlier. Like, instead of maybe framing it about our costs are going up, we could frame it in terms of, like, the the the improvements that we've made to our business. Right? You said we're learning more. We're changing. We're adapting. We're evolving. We're implementing new technology to make things smoother for you. We've been we we brought on board a new tax resource that you can, you know, pick their brain. Like, you know, like, there's changes. Like, you're all here in this session today because you're look you're making improvements to your business. And as you improve, you're adding more value to your clients. So we can kind of frame our price increases in that respect as well as we've made this improvement, that improvement, and this improvement over the year. And as a result, our prices are increasing as well. So sometimes that framing might be helpful. Yep. Yep. Where you're not the same firm you necessarily were when we first signed you up, you know, five years ago. We are very different. Awesome. So now let's move away from maybe just the basic compliance, and let's move into kind of the, you know, larger, fastest growing areas of the industry, which is, you know, planning and advisory. This is where pricing maturity can really shows up. Half of firms are using fixed fee or value pricing, forty five percent charge at least a thousand dollars annually, and one in five charge more than two thousand dollars. When we look when you look at this, Ryan, what opportunity do you think our firms are still missing here in this area? I tend to like to wrap these types of like, we're looking at, like, what is, like, basic how we pricing basic tax and how we pricing advisory and how we pricing this service. Personally, I like to wrap that all into one solution, one package, and I feel that increases the perceived value of what we're actually delivering and that takes us away from being a commodity. And, like, here's a menu of all the things we can do. I like to kinda, like, wrap this up into what here's the solution that we can provide to you to take you from point a to point b. It includes some of the compliance. It includes some of the advisory, and and I like to kinda wrap that all into one price. So maybe, like, maybe that's the opportunity I see here rather than, like, pricing separately for all these things. And then the other thing that I kinda see here is, you know, only a third are sorry. Only one out of five are pricing upfront. I see no reason why we should not be pricing upfront for every time we're fixed pricing something, there's no there's no reason why we should not be collecting upfront. That's what I did at my firm. We had we never had to chase for receivables. We simply stated as a matter of fact, this is the price we collect upfront, and then we and then we start the work, and it was never an issue for me. So that's the other issue. That's the other opportunity I see where we can improve our cash flow and save a bit of efficiency from having to chase after receivables. Definitely. And, Dawn, how do you help clients understand the value of advisory work specifically? I Oh, I think I I can't hear you, Don. Oh, yeah. I think we lost you, Don, for a second there. Think it cut out. Yeah. I think we got cut out there. Don, I think we will will Leave me hanging here, Don. I think your mic, disconnected or something because it cut in. Can you hear me now? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Okay. So it looks like it might be stable for a minute. My battery I don't know what's going on with my Mac. It's a mess. Anyway, what was your question, Evan? Yeah. We were just wondering. It's like, how do you help clients understand the value of the advisory type work? Yeah. One of the things the approach I made to my business owners is I said, listen. I I admitted to my business clients that I wasn't doing everything I should be doing for them. I said, listen. Right now, we're afraid to we're afraid to do extra things because we don't wanna bill you because at the time, we were doing hourly billing. And so we said, listen. We wanna give you the value you deserve and that you need from us. And so we we made that approach to them. We wanna do better tax planning. Don't you hate those big bills during tax season? Those were the kind of conversations we had with people, and it was life changing for both of us. You know, the client is so satisfied because we can be proactive. We can do things for them. And we, you know, we realized that it was important for us to really advisory, doing things we'd never done before. And and it it was life changing. It was, like, four and a half years ago now. And now the relationships and the planning and the advisory work that we do with the clients, they are so value it so much. So, so we've just found, again, conversations. That's we have conversations with people. That's fantastic. I feel like advisory work, I think what you both hit on is about being proactive, right, and and talking to clients. Mean, like, we're going to do this work. So many people do the advisory work, but it's, like, on request. Someone calls me up randomly out of the blue, and you do that work. It's like, be proactive. You know people want this stuff and get it in front of them. So one thing that I think is relevant, and if you're, you know, looking at some of findings of this report and thinking to yourself, I think we're due to increase prices. We're overdue to increase prices. We need to modernize our pricing structure. Probably would benefit from leveraging Ignition, whether it's presenting the new prices with an impressive and clear communicated proposal and engagement or gently nudging your clients into a preferred pricing model with some proposal options, or my favorite, just having year over year using Ignition to make the renewal reengagement process super, super efficient with all our built in tools to raise and adjust prices with the click of a button. And by making the price increase process simple, it can remove some of the biggest blockers, the lack of time, the lack of inconsistent repeatable process for your team. When price changes are regular and expected by clients, they become a lot less scary for everyone. I'll run and show a little preview of this a little bit later. Awesome. Let's make me jump into another poll here. And question, you know, thinking about these kind of approaches to business and pricing is, like, do you feel like you have all the tools that you need to actually execute this sort of stuff? Right? The mindset and the strategy is one thing, but, you know, having access to tools is is really, really helpful as well. Awesome. Everyone answers that poll. Now let's jump over into different side of the business. Let's jump into the monthly bookkeeping, monthly accounting type services. And no big surprises here. Fixed fee pricing dominates here. Nearly two thirds of firms that we surveyed are using fixed fee or value pricing. Most firms clustered between two fifty and seven fifty a month. Ryan, one of your comments on the report was that firms charging at the bottom end often attract the most price sensitive clients. Can you guys share a little bit more about that? Yeah. So, you know, the price that you set and advertise is a signal to the market about how good you are. And, you know, I'll tell a little story to maybe demonstrate this. You know, outside of what I do for work, my hobby is triathlon. And I, was training for a race a couple, last year and I suffered a nasty concussion and it knocked me out for quite a while. And I saw all kinds of specialists in the area and some of these specialists were pretty expensive. I probably saw about ten different specialists and I was really at like my wits end at that point. Things were not getting better. I was not able to get back to sport. And finally, my neighbor said, you know what? I have a really good referral for you. They, this person trains all the, works with all the Olympic athletes in Quebec to get them back to sport after concussion. So like a super specialized person that felt really good that could help me out. And I had the phone consultation with them, and it was like, he was saying all the right things, and I was like, wow. This is gonna be super expensive. I'm prepared to pay top dollar for this. And when we got to the price, he's like, okay. Well, I charge sixty bucks an hour. I was like, my immediate reaction was, is this even good? Like, is this even gonna be a good service? It's like, I would have expected it would be many multiples of this price. So and that's what your clients kind of feel. It's like if they see you advertise a hundred and fifty dollar tax return or bookkeeping at two hundred bucks a month, like, you're sending a signal. And that's the kind of reaction that your clients are gonna have to seeing that price, especially the the top quality clients, and you're gonna push them away. So price is a signal that you send to the market. The higher you set your price, the more high quality clients you're actually gonna attract. Perfect. So when using a fixed fee structure for your clients, it begs the question, what if the scope of work changes? So, Don, what happens at your firm if someone adds an ad hoc service? How do you kinda, like, protect your team and business from leakages like this? Like, this is one of the biggest barriers for some people for setting a actual monthly fixed price. Like, how do you handle that out of scope stuff? Yeah. Actually, because you so for me, again, I use the subscription pricing, relationship pricing. What's great about that when and I'm gonna give you two examples. This is for the relationship pricing part. When scope creep is so much easier for you to detect, when you know the things you're gonna do for them. Every once in a while, something a little bit of a curveball will come, and they're like, oh, can you handle this for me? I'm like, yeah. You know what? I can do that. I'll take care of that for you. The nice part about that is you get to make that decision and that choice. Now a Department of Labor audit, a state audit, an IRS audit, or notices, or different things like that that may be out of the realm. Maybe you took this client in twenty twenty four, and you've got notice that they've had issues from twenty twenty all the way to twenty twenty three or whatever. Okay. Hold on. That wasn't my work. That wasn't my that's not my fault. Whatever that happened, we're now out of scope. So those kind of things that that we you can you can detect it so quickly. Now the other thing, if you think about tax returns, which I'm a bill people upfront. I I I had a group call with some firms yesterday. I'm like, they're terrified to charge upfront. I'm like they're like, because, Dawn, what if they got another rental property? And I'm like, seriously? So what you're gonna do is you're gonna build your practice around exceptions instead of the rule? The rule is you pay up front. If we if we discover there's some kind of again, easy scope creep. You didn't have a rental property last year. Stop the horses. That's a twelve hundred and fifty dollar charge for me to do a new or make it's fifteen hundred if it's a brand new one. There's a little bit more work to do. It's immediate that you can tell. So with those who don't have the scope clearly defined and by the way, don't make a list of eight thousand things that you're gonna do for people. That's insanity. Like because then they're they're gonna go, oh, well, this is included in your list, so how is it out of scope? Like, that's your problem is you put too many things in your list, and now nothing's out of scope because you've listed everything. Like so that's the way I look at it when it comes to scope creep. Perfect. So those exact scenarios, it's like, go like, bill people for the work. Right? Identify it and and bill them. In addition, we have two tools actually that kind of cover these use cases. We have quick invoices. We have additional services. Using those tools, you can kind of just invoice for work. That was initially out of scope on a client's engagement. Or and you could do that by charging client right away. Or often, what I do is, you know, you can just add the charge to the client's future schedule. They're getting billed monthly. You add an extra service that goes on to their schedule on a going forward basis. No separate invoice. No anything like that, and everything automatically collected. And I'll demo that a little bit later. Now let's move into perhaps kind of the biggest growth opportunity in the profession, which is the, you know, CFO controller, virtual CFO services. In the CFO and controller world, we found a majority of firms charge either fixed fee or value based on a wide range of monthly average charges. No big surprises here. CFO services can tend to vary quite a bit depending on the client that's being served. That being said, nearly half of firms that we talk to don't even offer CFO services at all. Yet amongst firms that do, more than half charge at least fifteen hundred dollars per month and about one quarter charge over twenty five hundred dollars a month, and that number I know can go much higher for the the right client. Ryan, why do you think so many firms are kinda leaving this opportunity space untapped? I think it's just a completely different service offer. You know, the tax, you can that could roll in and roll out, you know, that's volume based and that, you know, the process is in place and they know firms know how to deliver that. Books, that could roll in and roll out pretty pretty smoothly, but the CFO type stuff can be more project based sometimes, and maybe we're not sure how to structure these services in a more repeatable fashion. And I often see scope issues occur with these types of services where we include, like, a, like, a very vague CFO service in our package, and then that could be are we doing a budget? Are we doing a strategy call? Are we doing projections? Or it just turns into anything the client wants. So I think, like, it really comes down to how we define what these services are and how we're gonna, you know, how we're gonna turn them into something repeatable that we can offer to our clients in a in a more smooth fashion. One of my favorite types of CFO type services to add are just regular strategy calls. And, you know, those could be monthly, quarterly, semiannually, and we don't do anything on the strategy call other than talk about your situation, talk about how we can improve your situation. I'm not building budgets on those calls or after the calls or things like that. So if we wanna dip our toe into these types of services, I think that would be probably a good option to add to the mix. Nice. Nice. Such a great starting point, and you can build from there based on what you at you at the firm do best as well. Awesome. Let's jump into another quick poll. And just at a high level, after we've talked about all these items, you know, what's do you feel like is your biggest pricing challenge presently in terms of getting you know, finding the right number or understanding what you should be charging people? Awesome. Few different few different answers across the board from from everyone here. So throughout today's report, we've really seen a recurring theme, and that's that it's not that firms don't want to raise prices. You know, everyone wants to raise prices, but it's also that many firms simply don't know if they are necessarily priced correctly or if they're gonna increase their prices, what that price should be that they should be charging. In fact, one of the biggest challenges for firms told us they face is uncertainty around what other firms are charging, and only a small percentage said they're very confident that their pricing fully reflects the value they deliver. A lot of people click that option in the poll. And that's actually the exact problem that, our team at Ignition built Price Insights to solve. So Price Insights is the accounting industry's very first AI powered pricing intelligence solution. So the goal of our tool here is to rather than relying on guest work, you know, just some annual surveys and some anecdotal stuff, you know, what someone posts on a Facebook group, the goal of PriceInsights is to do a real in-depth analysis, analyzing real proposals and billing data from comparable firms, provide tailored pricing recommendations, and directly within the kind of proposal and engagement process in Ignition. So when you're building a proposal in Ignition, price insights kinda lets you evaluate the service and compares it against similar service from firms with comparable characteristics and factor the service, gonna factor your industry, your location, the structure of billing, firm profile, and any other pieces of data you want to feed it, and it'll generate, basically, a suggested pricing range. Okay. What I personally like about the tool is it's not just pumping out a single number. It doesn't say charge eight hundred dollars and it's done. It gives, like, a full in-depth explanation on why it's making that recommendation. So you can see kind of benchmark range, the suggested price, the reasoning behind that recommendation so you can make the final decision with confidence that the, insights are accurate. We've seen some really interesting outcomes from the firms in Ignition that are using Trace Insights. So when we surveyed our customers who use price insights, over a third of them said it helped them under, identify their underpriced services. Third reported increased confidence in their pricing, and twenty percent said it helped them increase their prices. And firms told us it improved consistency across their client base, which is often the biggest challenge with increasing prices. The one result that really stood out to us, you know, as we saw, you know, third, third, third, for cost services where customers use price insights and ignition, they increase their prices average by forty percent. Right? That is not an insignificant number. Most firms that we talked to on today's benching report, we're gonna increase their prices by five to ten percent. Right? So forty percent, and even if that's identifying just a few customers where where you need to be increasing by that much can make a huge impact on the revenue you're expecting. So, again, when you have access to real market data and confidence behind pricing decisions, the opportunity can be massive. Right. You've spent years helping firms improve their pricing and profitability. When you look at a tool like this combining AI with real world pricing data, what excites you the most? Do you see it, like, helping firms overcome the confidence gap we've been seeing talking about throughout throughout today's report? Yeah. I I think it's a a big thing here is confidence and and knowing that we are worth it and that clients are willing to pay for that value. You know, we see that like, what I want people to take away from is we should not want to be in the benchmark. Like, if we look at all the the the data that we saw today, we don't wanna be in the benchmark. We wanna be above the benchmark. The benchmark is not cutting it. And we see plenty of other firms that are above that benchmark, and that's what we really need to be aiming for. We need the right profits coming in to have the right resources at the firm so that we're freeing our time up and able to grow our business without being shackled to it, and it really all starts with pricing. And it's easy for us to sit here and say you should two x and three x pricing. You could take, you know, baby steps to get there, but, really, I think the takeaway is we should not be in the benchmark. We should wanna be above the benchmark, and and tools like this, I you know, if they help you improve your confidence to get there, then, you know, certainly, they're worth it. Can't agree more. So before I jump into a quick demo of some of the Ignition features that we talked about today, just wanting to do a quick review of the resources that we're gonna be sharing out with everyone after today's webinar. You can look out for these in your inbox later this week. We're gonna get a recording from today's webinar. We're gonna get the price bench benchmark report. We're gonna get links to Dawn's designated motivator coaching program as well as access to future firms, newsletter today for free. So let us jump quickly into Ignition in action. So I can show you of what we've been talking about and how that layers into what we do over here in Ignition. So this is a proposal in Ignition. This is kinda where everything starts in Ignition, sending an engagement to a client, whether a new client or an existing client, for a reengagement. My proposal here has a cool little video, a little bit of an introduction. Then what I do in my proposal is I set up different package options that the client then between and decide what is the best fit for them. Breaks down the prices of the different packages, also includes potentially add ons, things like that. Client makes their selection, then they get a full scope of work. You know, again, this is the engagement letter. This is what you're doing. These are deliverables. The price that they chose, this is what informs the price and what's included or not included in the engagement. This engagement I created also had maybe some add ons. So you could add number of add ons to kinda give, you know, maybe a touch of little a la carte, picking. Oh, I think my screen sharing didn't work properly. Let me quickly run back to the beginning. Perfect. So introduction with a video. Let me see here. Sorry about that, folks. You just have to pretend that you were looking at something. So I have my proposal here in Ignition with a nice video and an introduction message. This proposal I built out has a number of options that the client can pick between, again, showing the different levels of service. Really, really helpful as I try to upsell clients into my engagement as well as also potentially if I'm trying to, again, gently nudge people in a new direction with my structure, a great way to do so. Once an option is selected, we get the full scope of work and engagement letters type content defining what's included, the deliverables, everything like that with the package that the client has selected. This engagement also has optional add ons, so client can then add extra things into the package if they would like. A nice clear breakdown of pricing based on their selections. What's cool is you can also include in the engagement the ability for the client to add their payment method. You can make that fully mandatory as well. So a client can't sign their engagement without putting their payment details in, and that is really what makes this pricing schedule not just a piece of paper with some details, but truly makes it actually a fully automated payment collection schedule. All that's left is the client has the terms and conditions to review, and then the client would sign their engagement. On the back end of Ignition, this is how we build it out. We have our different options built with a bunch of individual items we can add and kind of remove from an engagement based off of a library of services that I have preset up in my account. We set this up for you to get started, but you can also bring in all your own custom services and structures of work that you already have. If you have prebuilt packages already or if you're working with someone like Ryan to build amazing packages, this is exactly what you would be doing. And this is where price insights can come and be layered into the process. So you'll see we have a bunch of services in here, but maybe let's take a look at that virtual CFO service. Maybe that's the one I'm not super confident with my pricing. This is a great opportunity to use price insights. So just here on the right hand side, I can click analyze. And what it's gonna do is it's gonna take all the details from the service. Actually, I'll show you that. My service has a nice description in here. I have a price right now, but I want to analyze. And what's cool is you can also give it extra content. So if I just got off a discovery call from a client, maybe I have some notes. Let's add those in. You know, some extra details wasn't part of the service description, but I would like Ignition to factor that in as they do the price insights. We'll click get price insights, and Ignition is gonna run the analysis to try and figure out what the correct price and suggested price should be. Just in the interest of time, I'll jump over to my other tab where it's already been completed. And you see, this is the price insights over here. So like I mentioned before, it doesn't just pump out a single number. It gives a full detailed analysis based on the service, based on all the extra context I added in there, some insights, some strategy you can do, and, again, a kind of final range that you can pick between. So if you're like what Ryan mentioned, we're not aiming for benchmark. We're aiming for much higher. We're aiming for premium. So now I know that I do I can go in and adjust my service price. Twenty five hundred dollars. That sounds pretty good to me. Let's be on the top end of the spectrum. Oh, and that refreshed there. Perfect. Now one last thing I do want to show here is the actual process in Ignition for updating and adjusting billing afterwards. So let's jump into my Ignition account where a client has already signed their engagement. They have a billing schedule in the system. You'll see there's a couple different services that they have on their package getting billed fourteen fifty every single month. So the conversation comes up. The client has now asked for more. We need to adjust their packages. Let's say right now, again, we're doing reporting for them. We're doing some AP. We're doing some bookkeeping. Client has decided out of the blue. We never signed it, but they wanna do they want us to do payroll. They decided we want us to take over their payroll. This is an opportunity for expansion within this client, and let's make it as quick and easy as possible. All I do in Ignition here is come up to new. I come up to additional service. I add in the service that I want to get added in. Let's say it's payroll, like I mentioned, biweekly payroll. We're gonna pick a price for it. Again, I could run a price analysis by putting in the number of payroll, how I do the payroll, all that kind of details would be good to get the right price. And then all I'm gonna do is just make sure the billing matches this existing schedule. Hit next and create. And now when I go back to their billing schedule, you'll see it's been added into the billing schedule as well. I'll just make sure that's added to the right payment method, which is here. And so now everything is on one consolidated billing schedule, if I refresh my page properly, to be automatically billed every single month. Perfect. So you'll see July first, everything is getting billed to the card, and now it is just part of the schedule going forward. Awesome. So with that shown, we'd love to jump into our final poll for today. If you're interested in what we talked about here today, we'd love to know whether or not Ignition would be able to help you. So if you'd like to learn more, like to maybe get a more catered demo of the product to to walk through your process and what you do currently and how it could maybe fit in, let us know by answering in the poll, and we can definitely make sure to reach out. Just wanted to thank, everyone for joining here today. Just gonna take a quick look to see if there was any questions that we didn't answer just yet. Perfect. So I do see one question from the chat was asking whether or not we could use Ignition to help our clients with their prices, not directly from your own Ignition account. However, if you were to set up clients with their own Ignition account, where they could be using Ignition for their own engagements, for their own building management, and things like that, then they would be able to get access to, you know, using Chris insights like that. Let's see. Looks like there's a question from Deborah as well about, ignition itself. Deborah, what we can do is we can make sure to follow-up with you after the call, regarding that. We can make sure to talk about what that would look like. We would make sure that if you were to use Ignition, we would definitely make sure that you're set up for long term success for sure. Awesome. I think that covers all the questions, Ryan. I'm not sure if you saw anything else that I was missing in there or if you had any closing thoughts that you wanted to to to chime in with. All good on my end. Thank you for joining everyone, and thanks to Ignition for inviting me here today. Awesome. Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Ryan, for joining. Thanks, Don. Don had to jump a little bit early. But, yeah, I would love to make sure you connect with anyone who's interested in here, and thank you everyone again for joining. Look out for the resources that we're gonna be sharing later this week, and and we'll go from there. Alright. Thanks so much.
Be the first to see the newest accounting pricing benchmarks from Ignition and learn how to charge what you're worth.
What should you actually be charging for your services?
For most accounting professionals, the answer to "What should I charge?" is often: it depends. But what if you could see exactly how firms across the profession are pricing the same services you offer?
Join Evan Benson from Ignition alongside industry leaders Dawn Brolin (Powerful Accounting) and Ryan Lazanis (Future Firm) for a first look at Ignition's 2026 U.S. Accounting and Tax Pricing Benchmark insights. Powered by real pricing data and AI-powered Price Insights, this session reveals what firms are charging for services like tax, bookkeeping, and advisory—and why.
Together, they'll unpack key trends from the latest benchmark report and share practical strategies to help you price with confidence, communicate your value, and improve profitability.
Whether you’re reevaluating your firm’s pricing or simply curious where your services stack up in the market, this session will give you the clarity—and confidence—to charge what your expertise is truly worth.
What you'll learn
By the end of this session, participants will be able to:
Analyze current benchmark pricing data for common accounting and tax services to better understand market positioning.
Recognize how pricing transparency and AI-driven insights can reduce uncertainty in firm pricing decisions.
Apply practical strategies to improve pricing confidence and communicate the value of their services more effectively.
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