What are others charging? 2025–26 Pricing benchmark insights

Hello. Hello, everyone. Welcome. Welcome. Thank you everyone for joining us today for our what are others charging twenty five twenty six pricing benchmark insights session. Just as we wait for everyone to join and jump in, just curious, where's everyone joining from today? We'd love to hear in the chat just to see where everyone's coming from across, you know, the United States, across Canada, everything like that. Seen a bunch of people. I'm personally located in Toronto, Ontario up there here in Canada. I'm seeing people all over the place. Queen of New York, Seattle, Wake Forest. Amazing. So to kick things off and introduce myself, my name's Evan Benson. I'm a key account manager here at Ignition. I'll be the moderator for today's session. At Ignition, I work every day with accounting, tax, and other professional services businesses as they kind of approach the challenge and opportunity for onboard billing processes for onboarding clients, implementing new tools, and relevant today is approaching the task of pricing client engagements. Throughout the entire session today, feel free to add some comments and questions into the chat, or use the q and a function if you have a specific question you'd like addressed. Possible, we'll answer a bunch of the questions live, save them for extra time at the end. Or if we can't get it to it, we'll make sure we can always follow-up with you after the session. As a note, because I guarantee there'll be a whole bunch of questions for this, today's webinar is being recorded, and we are gonna share it out later this week. So just running through today's agenda for the session, here's what we're gonna be covering. So we're gonna start by running through some key highlights and findings from the newest edition of our US accounting and tax benchmark pricing report. We're gonna do a deep dive into the pricing on a few categories in accounting and tax space, including some commentary, thoughts, and insights from our expert panel who I'll introduce in just a moment. We shared a number of resources, tools, and recommendations based off of our the findings. And we're gonna do also a quick little demo of Ignition so you can see kinda where Ignition fits into this whole process. If you're not already familiar with Ignition, we are the platform to take you from leads to cash, transforming your sales, billing, and payments processes, and we're trusted by over eight thousand service based businesses. 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 or prospects, getting proposals and engagement letters signed, collecting and automating payments, renewals and reengagement, and really everything in between. So before I introduce the panel for today, I wanna just lock go in and launch our very first poll just to make sure we tap into just know the primary reason why you folks are here today just to to see what's on everyone's mind. Awesome. Some while people are answering that, I think now seems like a great time for me to introduce today's expert panel. Joining me today to provide some commentary or reactions and answer some questions related to this year's pricing benchmark insights are Brian Lozanis, the founder and CEO of FutureFirm. We have Logan Graff, the owner of Graff Tax Company, and we have Michael Lai, CEO of Reconciled. I'll let them each introduce themselves a little bit more. Ryan, let's start with you. Care to share a bit about yourself with our audience? Alright. Hello, everybody. Nice to see you here. I'm Ryan Lozanas, CPA from Montreal, Canada, another Canadian here on the in in the event. And I'm really glad to be here with Logan and Michael. Really looking forward to hearing some of their perspectives on this pricing benchmark. So bit of my background, I had an early cloud accounting firm in twenty thirteen called Zen Accounting. I took it from scratch to acquisition in just five years. It was acquired by a corporate services firm based out of Europe. And then twenty eighteen, I created FutureFirm to be the resource I wish I always had when I was running my firm because I didn't know how to price. I didn't know how to sell. I didn't know how to market. I didn't know how to manage a team. So I I had to make all those mistakes myself. So Future Firm really just started out as a blog, a newsletter, morphed into a podcast, where I created actionable practical content to help other firm owners unlock freedom and growth. And a couple years ago, I launched Future Firm Accelerate, which is our online coaching program, which gives proven systems, expert coaching, and a like minded community of over seven hundred firms from around the world for those that are looking to unlock freedom and growth in their business. So, yeah, I'll, pass it over to you, Logan. Awesome. Thanks, Ryan. My name is Logan Graff. I'm a CPA down in Austin, Texas. Shout out to my Texas viewers right now. I have a small virtual CPA firm, serve everybody in Texas pretty much, but I also create YouTube content, videos for other accountants on basically, I share how I run my own firm, and I also have a community for new firm owners or people who wanna start their own firm. Michael? Hey, everybody. I'm Michael Lee. I'm CEO, founder of Reconciled. I've been running this business for about ten years now, launched in two thousand sixteen. We're a national outsourced bookkeeping and accounting services firm, primarily serving small businesses throughout the US. I've got team members throughout the US as well as in South America, and looking forward to this panel on this call. Awesome. Thanks, everyone. So before we get much further, I thought this is a good quick time to mention. As Ryan mentioned, he runs FutureFirm Accelerate as his coaching program. But really cool, we actually recently launched our Ignition plus future firm Accelerate bundle. So if you're interested at any point of the kind of stuff that Ryan's speaking to and also find yourself interested in Ignition, super cool opportunity to bundle those two together and save a little bit of money. We'll talk a little bit more about it much later. And that kinda takes us to the entire reason why we're here today, which is the twenty five twenty six pricing benchmark survey report. At Ignition, we're on a mission to kinda take the guesswork out of pricing, helping professional services firms price with confidence and clarity. That's why we invested in creating an in-depth, pricing reports reports for industries like accounting and other professional services to help give you kind of insights and you need to set the right price, win more business, and maximize your revenue. The new report we have will be sent out to everyone's email next week when it officially launches, so you'll have the chance to really dive deep into all the details and insights. But today, we get to share an exclusive reveal of this year's data and findings. Last year, we released our very first annual benchmark pricing survey report, and we kinda built on it. So this new this year, we this report has one way more insights from Ryan. We now have the ability to to perform some year over year comparisons since we have two years of data to to compare against. And then we've also had the chance to add a bunch of new questions this time, specifically about pricing confidence and other behavioral insights that I think you're gonna find really, really interesting. I can also share we're actually currently working on an equivalent pricing benchmark report for the digital agency industry. So if you have any clients in that side of the professional services world, tell them to keep an eye out. To bring you this year's report, we reached out to a significant group of US based accounting professionals just this past July. Our mission is really simple, capture a clear picture of national industry trends and uncover price benchmarks for some of the most common tax and accounting services. All the insights you'll see today come directly from firm owners, partners, and key decision makers in accounting and tax practices across the country. It's a real world snapshot of how your peers are pricing, operating, and navigating the market, and I think you'll define the results both surprising and useful. So let's get into the good stuff. What did we actually find? Couple highlights from the report. When we asked firms about the plans for twenty twenty six, the majority told us that they're gearing up for price increases, mostly in the five to ten percent range. In fact, eighty percent of firms plan to raise prices next year. Nearly half of them said rising business costs are the driving force behind those increases. But here's where it kinda gets interesting. Two new insights emerged this year. First, fear of losing clients is now the number one reason firms hold back from raising prices. Prices. And second, pricing confidence is actually on the rise with over ninety percent of, surveyors telling us that they're at least somewhat confident in their current pricing strategy. So that leads me to a quick question for Ryan. Ryan, you've coached hundred of firm owners and have your finger on the pulse of what's happening right now in the market. Do these numbers match what you're seeing out there? I'd say so. I mean, a big part of our coaching is really starting with packaging and pricing. That's one of the biggest levers I think you can pull in your business, not only to improve profitability, but to also work less. The busiest firms that I come across are the ones that are undercutting themselves and underpricing. So to generate a certain amount of revenue, they have to have a certain amount of clients. If we if we know like, if we understand a bit of price theory, we're able to increase our prices without necessarily increasing the amount of work that we deliver, and and and therefore, we could, improve our bottom line. So, like, the one thing that stands out here is the price increase. The majority of firms plan to increase their prices by five to ten percent in twenty twenty six. I think that was pretty similar to last year, if I recall correctly. And that's just not a a big enough price increase for the majority of firms. Not all firms, but for the majority of firms. Most clients are going to accept. And what what we what I what I like to try and do when it comes to price increase is not just increase price, but also shed the c and d level clients. And if we are like, if we're overworked, we have too many clients, we're bitten off more than we can chew, a price increase strategy is one way to eliminate yourself of some of the the bottom tier clients in your firm. And if you're only increasing five to ten percent, most the majority of your clients are just gonna say yes. So it means we haven't bumped up against that threshold. So that is a typical price increase that I see across firms, five to ten percent. My argument is that it's just simply not high enough. Awesome, Ryan. I cannot agree more. So let's now dive a bit deeper into some of the more specific highlights from the survey in a few different categories. So, specifically, in the world of tax preparation services, we'd ask firms, how do you currently price your tax preparation services? We saw thirty seven percent of people now charging with a fixed fee, around twenty three percent charging with a minimum plus complexity. Only three less than three percent are charging entirely hourly. Gonna be honest. That makes me very, very happy to see. And then I also we also asked them when did they typically collect those fees for tax preparation service. Around forty percent say they collect on billing on completion, around thirty percent taking a deposit and then a remainder later, around thirty percent billing entirely upfront, and then ten percent billing monthly or baked into their monthly fees. Actually, interesting if you look at all that altogether and put all those numbers together, that actually means that a majority of firms are taking some kind of payment upfront prior to starting their work. Right? Deposits entirely upfront or, you know, monthly fees typically are ahead of time. I think that's actually really interesting insight. This leads me to a quick question for Logan. Over the years, you and your practice, you've transitioned how you collect your payment for your services. Can you talk a little bit about that journey and how that's impacted your business? Absolutely. Thanks, Evan. So, yeah, when I first started my firm about five years ago, I was all about billing on completion just because that was the industry norm. And according to the survey, pretty much it it continues to be the norm, but I feel like we're starting to shift around those numbers a little bit. So, yeah, the first few years, I I I would bill my tax return projects when I finished them. You know? Of course, I would collect payment first and and then file the return, but as time went on, it it just didn't seem right. I was basically holding the bill essentially for for the services I was providing, and it and the timing of services just it just felt kind of weird to me, and it felt, I don't know. And so I switched to a fifty percent deposit upfront, and I used Ignition to do that. It was fairly simple, but it provided still some kinda admin complexities. And nobody, you know, nobody batted an eye when I went to fifty percent upfront, and, it worked out pretty well. And then that was kind of a test to to go to a hundred percent upfront for my individual tax return projects, clients. So I bill a hundred percent upfront for my tax return now for any tax planning I do and any, like, consulting that's gonna be happening throughout the year. Hundred percent upfront. And when I switched to that, this I think this is my second or third year doing that. And when I switched to it, one person, gave me a fit. And they're they're like, yeah. We can't do this anymore. And we'll you know, we pay our contractors when when they're done with the work. And so, that that was perfectly fine. You can work with somebody else that builds on completion, but they're they're back. And so I think a big fear maybe is is like, oh, clients aren't gonna like that. And and, actually, that wasn't the case at all. And now now that I have a team and I work with employees, having that money come in January first or the beginning of January is extremely important to to cover payroll for for my employees and and and just matches the cadence of the the services, the timing of the service I'm providing. Now business returns, business clients, they get spread out throughout twelve months, and, I I would recommend timing of the payments based off the timing of the services provided. So I tried doing monthly payments for individual clients, and it was just weird when I was just doing the return and still billing them out throughout the the year, and the clients kinda were weird about that. And so business clients, they have they require more consulting throughout the year and more touch points, and so a monthly payment is a little bit more appropriate. Awesome. Thanks, Logan. Yeah. I've seen similar processes, similar transitions happen in so many firms. And I honestly, I feel like that's the same finding for most people is it's not as bad as what I thought it was gonna be. Mhmm. Awesome. So next, we asked some firms, you know, what's the average fee, your firm charges for those for those basic individual tax returns or basic business tax returns. For individual returns, we found majority of folks charge between forty to eighty percent, or eighty for sorry. Four hundred to eight hundred dollar. That's around forty nine percent. And then over in for business returns, we found that majority respondents over fifty percent, fifty six percent charge two thousand and two thousand dollars for their services. So a question here for Michael. What are your thoughts around this? Is this on far par with, like, what your firm charges? Yeah. So the what the survey came back with, I would say, is on the lower lower end of what we charge, kind of the minimum range of what we charge. And but I'm not surprised to see this result. There are many, many firms that I've run across and talked to where they began with a certain set of clients and they actually never have raised prices on those clients maybe because they were friends and family or they were the first clients and they want to keep them and they feel loyal to them. So this isn't this isn't surprising. I think there is a fear from from tax professionals that raising prices to get the averages up or to get it on par with more premium service will will have them lose clients and you will. You'll lose some clients, but it won't be as many as you think as both Ryan and Logan talked about. And it really is where you want to position your firm. If you want to be a commodity player that's just pumping out basic individual returns or are you trying to be a more boutique player that's preparing more complex returns and larger size returns with clients. So it really depends on positioning, but this the results aren't surprising and they kind of fit in part for what I'm seeing out there, but they would be on the lower end of what our our firm charges. Awesome. Thanks, Michael. That's really helpful. It's nice to get a little bit of openness on pricing, and we always appreciate that. Jumping over into the world of the kind of tax planning and more advisory style services. For those kind of services, we found that around sixty percent, of people are currently priced their services either with some sort of value pricing or fixed fee. Still around seventy percent billing, hourly. Honestly, compared to the equivalent findings on the tax prep side, I'm not overly surprised by the differences here, as the pricing definitely shows. You know, these are generally high value services. However, I do find when I talk to firms, they do definitely have a harder time scoping out these services, defining those services, and thus pricing those advisory type services. So the seventy percent billing hourly really speaks to that to me. Logan, question. You've been very open and transparent with the accounting community about how your pricing structure has changed and how you communicate those change, you know, even using your website. Can you talk us through that journey and how your pricing structure works now? I think you got to touch on it a little bit in your previous answer as well, but anything else to add? Yeah. I do wanna point out a point in this slide right now. A good amount of firms charge greater than two thousand dollars for tax advisory and planning services, which caught my eye when I was reviewing the results because there's there was a you'll you'll get the report later, but there's also a a pretty decent gap between how many firms bill over two thousand dollars and then bill in the range of five hundred to seven hundred and fifty for those type of services. So it's really cool and encouraging to see a lot of firms. They are probably what you consider, like, value pricing those types of engagements, which gives me encouragement for for my for me on how I price and hopefully for y'all as well in that clients will pay these types of prices for, for planning. And and I think it's very valuable. And and, of course, people are gonna be paying for it as long as we can present that value. And so I think that's kind of segues into Evan's question for me is how I present that value to, my clients. And so I use a three tiered proposal process. You know, When I first started my firm, I was going to just pull over the the the pricing I was always used to, at the firm I was at before and how every other firm bills essentially is, you know, you bill for the tax return. And then and then throughout the whole year, you answer all these questions from clients for free because that's just included. Right? Right? It's but I I realized, like, it probably should be billed separately. Any questions that clients have for you that, you know, is is valuable as is that it it it needs your expertise should be, charged for. And so saying you you include it in your tax prep fee, I don't really believe that when people say that because their fee would be a lot higher in my opinion. But I use, three package proposals. You know, I think, it's it's actually in Ignition. If you use Ignition, you can see my template. I I don't know what it's called exactly, but I I try to I try to upsell my services using these tiers. And so and I try to point everybody to the middle tier by making the upper tier, as more of like a hands on, like, I'm gonna do everything for you. And then I try to make the middle tier basically what everybody wants. And then I also price that at a price that is considerably, lower than my highest paid tier, but also has the services that aren't gonna cost me the most amount of time. And, I use pricing as, like, a as, like, a psychology experiment. Every year, I'm seeing, okay. Who chose what package? Then who's what who is asking for what services later on? And they chose this package earlier in the year, and and that helps me establish, alright, what do I need to adjust for for the future years? Awesome. Yeah. I find those those three tier options. You probably see this all the time, but what's so helpful I find is is client makes their selection. They pick their package, but you they also know what the higher package is. Right? So when you have to have a conversation about them, you know, a few months later and say, hey. Like, this extra conversation is gonna cost them money, That's not a surprise because, you know, they know that they didn't choose, you know, the gold premium tier. Right? So I think that helps also with those conversations. You do need to charge someone money for something extra later. And the template, I think, is just called the graph tax company. Which? Simple. Something like that. Yeah. It looks like Neil said graph tax co. There you go. Awesome. Yeah. I think those that's really interesting. And looking at the other kind of numbers and stuff here, question for Ryan. What do you think is just the biggest opportunity here? I I think the big opportunity is from a cash flow standpoint. You know, thirty percent, you know, charge a hundred percent on completion. Only twenty two percent are charging upfront, basically. So that leaves another seventy eight percent that, would be able to charge upfront, as Logan said. And I'm fully on board with, you know, his strategy of moving to a hundred percent, collection upfront. I also really like the approach that he takes for the three tier packaging and pricing. I think when we do that, we give ourselves the opportunity to move our prices upstream because if we just offer one option, sometimes we get a little bit maybe shy or scared, and we're we're, you know, we're maybe when underpriced ourselves to not scare off the client and get them into the firm. But if you have two other more premium options, you'll see that a big chunk of the time, if you do it properly, kinda like Logan Logan explained, you're gonna get people on more more, you know, higher priced packages. And I may be going off tangent here, but, you know, as I mentioned earlier, pricing is not just a a way to increase your profitability and your revenues, but also a way to control your capacity. So I like what Logan said about, you know, not answering emails throughout the year if that's not something that's included in the package. So as an example, your bronze package, perhaps it just includes tax prep and a a Loom video to review, you know, the tax return, doesn't include a meeting, and no support during the year, whereas your silver might include, you know, a Zoom call and perhaps maybe two or three calls throughout the year for questions. So it's a way to, as I mentioned, not only raise revenues and profitability, but control your capacity as well. But the big opportunity I see here is the collection moving to collection upfront from a cash flow standpoint and also looking to bundle the planning and advisory services with the compliance services so we have one price for the complete solution. Amazing. Can't agree more. Awesome. Let's jump into another quick little poll here. Just curious for everyone. How do you currently manage your annual price increases? I see people chatting in the in the chat there about this exact topic, looking for some some tips. So, yeah, I just wanna hear from everyone, how they go through that entire process. Cool. Cool. The reason I asked that is because we, if you're looking at these findings report and thinking to yourself, you know, we have people due for for price increases. We need to modernize or update our pricing structure. I think that's really some of the things that we would leverage from using Ignition, whether it's presenting new prices with those community proposals, like those templates that we just mentioned. We have Logan's templates. We also have a bunch of templates from Ryan as well. Really help communicate the different options, the different packages. You can also use those options to be, like I said, generally nudging them into a preferred pricing model. If you're not don't wanna be quite as aggressive, you can, say, send a proposal which has an option with some really nice looking pricing to move people in. And, also, importantly as well, year over year, Ignition makes it really easy to kind of for that renewal reengagement process with tons of built in tools for raising, adjusting prices with just a click of the button. I'm gonna go into that in a quick little demo at the end of, the session. So if you wanna just check that out, stay tuned, and and you'll get a sneak peek. So jumping over into the monthly bookkeeping and accounting services, some of our findings were looked like this. So a majority of firms who do bookkeeping and accounting services are using a fixed fee structure. And the pricing that they're typically doing is kinda between two hundred and fifty dollars per month to seven hundred and fifty dollars per month. Really no big huge surprises here. I think this is the kind of stuff that that, that fits into what most people do. Really slow low percentage of people still doing their bookkeeping and accounting services on an hourly basis. Another little quick little poll just to get a quick sense of ever how everyone's feeling. Just wanna see if you want if you're interested in seeing how Ignition can help kind of with that payment increase, price increase, invoices, payment collection, stuff like that, let us know. We can, make sure to follow-up with you after today's session. So when using a fixed fee structure, like and especially like that monthly accounting and and, bookkeeping services with the structure, it really kinda begs the question, you know, like, what happens if the scope of work changes? Right? So let's if two hundred fifty to seven hundred dollars, what if things come up? Michael, what happens at your firm when someone adds an ad ad hoc service? How do you protect your team and business from that kind of leakage? Yeah. So to answer that question, we make sure in every proposal that we have a list of the ad hoc services available, and we actually have pricing on those so that our customers can go ahead and choose those services during during their, you know, signature process or engagement process with us. Then also we are a follow-up with the customer if they do decide to engage with another service that isn't included in their scope. We tell our our team members that, hey, point them to the account management, certainly, sales team, and then they can go back and actually have a reengagement on their agreement. You know, sometimes you wanna be able to I think most of us wanna be able to go above and beyond for our clients. And sometimes if they ask a question or want something on a one off, you wanna provide them that service. And then and on occasion, that might seem fine. But generally speaking, customers, unless they're told no, they will take what they can get for free. You know? If you give it to them for free, they will take it for free. And there's that's no different than most of us. If we get something for free, we'll take that, and we'll often not volunteer. Can I pay you more money because you gave this to me for free? That usually isn't the case. So having a follow-up mechanism, is what we do, is really important in laying that pricing out really clearly. And then on the on the pricing, you know, on the pricing averages, I would say that, you know, most of the firms I'm I've seen in in the in the survey told us is that they're pricing way too low. Our averages are more than double what what most firms are charging. We're well over a thousand dollars a month on average for those services and I've even seen firms doing oh well over twenty five hundred dollars a month for the same kind of services. So there is there is something to say about the way you sell it and the way you're the way you're pricing it and also the value you're putting in and and the way that you're you're able to communicate that value to a customer think, is really really important. So I think most firms are are not charging enough on on this service. This service is valuable and and and I think that, you know, a lot of us have have to go back and kinda do a do a a revaluation of our pricing to make sure to ensure that is that you're, really on par with the higher the higher value on pricing. Awesome. And I think, Michael, I think, based on what I'm seeing in the chat here, I think they a lot of people are right now finding out that they are also pricing things a little bit too low. By the way, just a quick question I just saw in the chat pop up there. He, just almost wondering how big is your firm to kinda give a little context. Yeah. We have forty team members, across the US and in South America. Awesome. Thanks. So, I thought it would be a good place to jump in and add in, in Ignition. We have a couple specific tools for because kind of those specific ad hoc use case as well. The specific tool for kind of ad hoc stuff is often called InstantVille. So InstantVille is like a feature we have that allows you to kinda quickly invoice stuff that was never initially scoped out on a client engagement. So as you kinda mentioned, sometimes when people add stuff on, it's time to do, like, a full reengagement. Sometimes the services are just, like, so so minor that, you know, when I make a client sign an entirely new contract, it's, like, a little bit overkill. So with Instant Bill, it's pretty cool. You can just kinda charge a client right away, just send an invoice. You can send an invoice for them to review or just add on a charge to a future scheduled invoice, which is, like, my personal favorite way to do it. So it just gets automatically collected in their next monthly billing. And I'll show a little demo of that a little bit later. Yeah. I think I'm seeing some people in the chat who use Instant Bill. Cool. Jumping over to the world of, like, CFO and controller services. In the CFO and controller world, we found a majority firms, again, charging either fixed fee or some sort of value based billing and really with a very wide range of monthly average charges. Not a huge surprise there. I think, like, CFO services can tend to vary quite a bit, especially depending on the size of business that's being served. So nothing super, super surprising, but still some pretty cool insights there if you work in that kind of CFO and controller service world. Jumping to an really interesting topic that we couldn't possibly, miss and not talk about. We didn't have any super specific questions around AI in this year's report, but I think we can all agree it's important to talk about AI. Important topic to discuss when it comes to talking about pricing strategy and approach and all those sorts of things. And, frankly, it's just about making sure you're keeping your business at the forefront of technology and strategy. Opportunities in AI are practically endless. That's not hard to start thinking about how exciting ideas some exciting ideas about how to leverage that power in the pricing and packaging space. So if you haven't heard yet, addition, we're kind of currently building a really exciting new pricing intelligence tool that's gonna use rebuild real billing data and leverages AI to kind of provide tailored pricing suggestions for your services, looking at comparable services for business similar to yours and to analyze pricing. I saw a ton of questions in the chat. People ask in a, asking, you know, you know, what is people charging in this in Colorado? What are people charging in these different states? So, you know, definitely definitely, this will be a really cool and interesting, tool for a lot of people. We are expect yeah. We're expecting to kinda launch this new tool in q four, about pricing availability, how it's gonna work. So if you wanna stay in the loop for these developments and join the wait list to get early access, as an Ignition customer, check out the link that we just dropped, in the panel here. So I wanna jump over to Ryan. What are your thoughts around leveraging AI with pricing and, like, where can folks kinda start right now? I mean, I think it's, it's it's good to have this gut check readily available. Like, you know, seeing these statistics, I think, helps to see where you might skew, you know, compared to your peers. But just because you are like, for instance, you could see, like, the average price for, like, the the biggest cohort of of of, pricing for for bookkeeping, I think, was, like, under five hundred bucks a month. Like, I don't think you wanna aim for the average in these instances. You wanna you wanna beat the averages. So it's kinda it's kinda neat to see how we we can get these gut checks with AI now. However, just because it says that it should be this price, we still have some work to do to be able to convince clients to pay that price. So there's still, like, you know, proper pricing is a function of your sales process, how you understand the client, how you package an offer up, how you communicate the offer, and how you ultimately close the deal just because I think the AI could help you, like I said, with a gut check, but we still need to understand the people side of the equation. We need to understand the person that we're speaking with to be able to close them on that price. So if the AI comes back and says, well, you know, for this service, you should be charging ten thousand dollars. That's great. But until we've adequately communicated the return on investment for the client, they're never gonna say yes. So I think it's a good tool, but I don't think we can overly rely on AI either to to to land us great prices. Awesome. Cool. I just want to I think, Logan wanted to talk a little bit as well, I think, about a few other things related to kind of reasons for for pricing changes. So, Logan, what were your thoughts on that? And that was related to maybe one of the slides we were showing earlier. Yeah. So the could you hit it up, Evan, possibly? Yeah. Which one? That was the I think there was a slide on on reasons to raise rates, or was it just a poll? Yeah. I think we just had the the kind of I think yeah. Or or might have came from one of these ones. Okay. So and and it's in the report too. Maybe I'm just remembering the report. So the report, lists a lot of reasons for for raising rates, and the biggest one is to to upkeep with biz rising business costs, essentially. And I I wanna just give some encouragement. If you're struggling to make big steps in raising your rates, keeping up with business costs is great. You never wanna lose money year over year due to raising costs and you not raising costs. That's just gonna happen every year. So having set setting an expectation for your clients that, hey. Prices are gonna increase every year due to raising rising costs. That's great. Something else to to give you motivation is that new, bill that was just passed, which has a tremendous amount of new tax laws in there. And these aren't like simple laws. We're gonna have to actually do a lot of learning and training on on how to improve and how to improve ourselves and learn how to implement it on tax returns. And with that, the IRS is going to be a big mess this year. So if you do any sort of interaction with the IRS, you may wanna consider segmenting that service from your typical, tax return prep because if you if you're having to deal with IRS these days, it could it could, like, bust it could take hours. I don't know. It can bust your budget for whatever project you have because you're spending hours on a simple, simple notice, but the IRS is just, can't handle it properly. But yeah. So one way Ryan alluded to this earlier is using pricing as a measure to control your capacity. I can you do polls on the fly, Evan? Is that possible? Think I don't think we can, but we can we could pulse check the chat, I think, pretty easily. We'll pulse check the chat. Sorry. I'm putting Evan on the spot. But, like, who feels overworked right now? Like, they have too much work. Like, say yes. I feel like I have too much work. You know, twenty people just said yes instantly. And I have a feeling that's the case for everybody. I don't know any accountants that have actually ever said I don't have enough work unless they just started in the last, you know, couple of years. But even still, it doesn't take long to fill up your your book as a new new accountant, new firm owner. And so I I love using pricing as a way to control capacity because it's a lever you can can can pull to increase the capacity that you have in your firm. What I mean by that, just the just clients leave and you all of a sudden have more time to either get new clients or or do whatever you want in your firm. And so the after the after, like, the two year mark of running my firm, I realized I had way too many clients And I was increasing pricing, of course, every year, but it it just wasn't enough, essentially. And so I chose kinda the bottom third or so of clients that had a complex return and their price didn't really match what I was charging for their complexity and, and the current market rates that I was charging new clients. And so I basically took a third of those clients and raised their rates fifty percent or more, and some of them are two hundred percent. And guess what? Clients left, of course. The clients that I wanted to leave left. And so all these clients that left gave me more time, but all the all the increased fees that that I did that year, the the difference in increased fees covered all of the clients that left. So I was making more money and working less. And so I highly encourage you if you feel those that said yes, like, please try to use pricing as, as a way to help control your work. And it's very hard. It's an it's an emotional experience. I understand it's it's not fun to do this, and it takes a lot out of you. And, there's there's others out there that that have templates. I have a template myself on exact wording on what to say to the client that I use every year, for these specific clients. And so it's an it's an emotional push, but when you come out of it, you feel like a new person, and you can actually get you can get better paying clients that way because now you can you have space to do so. Can I add a couple things there, Evan? Go for it. Yeah. So first, to everyone, Logan is a good follow on LinkedIn and YouTube because he's he's building in public. So he's testing things out, trying things out, and sharing his experiences whether it worked or not. So he he's a pretty good follow on on social. There's two things I wanted to to to add to, what Logan mentioned. One is when he was addressing the the number one reason why people are looking to increase their their prices is due to rising costs. The one thing I would say there is how we if that's your reason for raising prices, that's fine. However, I would, I would suggest not to justify your price increase due to your own rising cost because your clients don't care. Instead, what I would suggest is to justify your price increase due to other things, other improvements you might have made to your business or your firm in the past year or so. And everyone's made improvements. We're all here working on our business. We're all here improving things. You might have added some new security practices. You might have added some new tools or apps that are making your lie clients' lives easier by streamlining certain certain processes. Maybe you hired a new tax resource that they could ask questions to. So and that's kinda what, like, a lot of the software companies do is they justify. They say, hey. We did all this great stuff in the past year, and as a result, now our new price is this. That's that's one way that I suggest raising prices, especially when you're not chain changing service level is to to to have the client in mind first rather than your own reasoning about around, rising costs. And the other thing the other point I'll mention is if you are nervous about increasing prices, like Logan said, he increased prices by two hundred percent. Well, that makes a lot of people nervous. You don't have to send one email to all your clients at once. You can test that out with a subset of your clients. You can take your c and d level clients and try right increasing costs by fifty percent or a hundred percent, you know, especially if you don't really even want these clients on board. See how they react to that, Then then iterate on that for your b clients. Then iterate on that for your a clients. So you don't have to do one price increase across your entire client base at once if that makes you nervous. You could do it in small chunks. So those are the two only two things I wanted to add. Thanks, Ryan. I just saw a couple of mentions in the chat, and feel free anyone to jump in here. Kind of the challenge of of adjusting prices when you're, like, taking over potentially, like, a different book of business from someone else, either you're, like, taking over a firm or, you know, someone's retiring and you and you bought that book from them, where that other firm was charging really, really below like, low prices. Any tips, any thoughts on just that that process? Because that that's when I feel like comes up a lot when with with the people I've been working with. Well, we've done we've done three acquisitions at Reconciled and so inherited books, you know, a set of tax clients and a set of bookkeeping clients. And most of the firms we purchased were fifty to a hundred percent, you know, low fifty percent at least lower in pricing. We were fifty to a hundred percent double, you know, in price increase in price from their average. So one is one communicating your value to the customer as Ryan just talked about positioning yourself and saying hey we're providing this service. We're gonna we're gonna upgrade your technology. We're gonna upgrade the way we communicate with you. We're gonna provide this extra extra service and and do it in a in a in a different experienced way or a better experienced way. All those things are really really important. And to not be afraid of losing clients that are just not paying enough where they're not gonna be profitable. At the end of the day, if you're charging too low, you're gonna be serving a client you're not making money on. Why would you want to keep them at that low price or why would you want to keep that client? So as Ryan talked about those c and d clients that are either priced too low or they they take way too much time out of your hands in the service compared to the price they're paying, they should be paying you a fair price of more than fair price. So doing that on a methodical level as well. So we would we would take over the book, communicate with the client, and then methodically raise their prices over time to let them know we plan to get them to this certain point so that they're not surprised maybe over a one year, two, or three year period. So that's that's really really important. Again, not being afraid to lose them. The other piece is the way you service clients. So you might be a firm that only services remotely like that or like our firm. We would take over from where their clients sometimes came to the office or dropped off dropped off things. So it was it was on our responsibility to prepare the client to transition out of that kind of service. Equipping them with the tools to be able to submit those documents online, being able to get on Zoom or some some video interface so that they can interact with our team and really can see that the experience was much more convenient and better for them. So that really takes preparing some change management with your with those clients that they can understand and see the value of why that's a better experience and a better service. Awesome. Yeah. I've seen some of those transitions go incredibly well. I've seen them sometimes get a little bit stressful and crazy. I think a good thing to remember is, especially when you're taking on a big book, right, like like all of you guys are mentioning, not everyone from that book is gonna be a great fit for you. There's probably gonna be a big chunk of them that are, and when you can get them onto the right pricing, they're gonna be fantastic clients. But there's you know, you didn't get to pick that, that group, so there's definitely gonna be some that need to be shed along the way. Michael, while I have you here quickly, just I saw another quick question from the chat. Someone just asked, like, do you when it's related to kind of, I think, some of the monthly services, do you bill based on, like, the amount of transactions someone does per month or just based on clients' overall revenue? So we have we have a a handful of variables that go into our value based pricing. It's gonna be transaction level, revenue level, complexity of services. And then one that's it's harder to measure, but it's gonna be important is what is the perceived value that you're providing this business owner? So so one business owner could be paying a thousand dollars a month for for a service and a different business owner, a different customer could be in two thousand dollars for the same exact service. So and why is that? The the reason why that is is because the customer that's paying two thousand, there is a variable of perception of what are you at what value are providing them. For example, they may highly value the time that you're saving them. Maybe they tell you maybe they communicate to you, I'm spending all weekend doing my books after the week is over. Well, that customer wants their weekends back and having your weekend back is a of high high value. So we we make sure that not only we're taking into account transactions, complexity of service, revenue levels, and and all those things that are more quantifiable. We're also taking the unquantifiable things of, hey, what is the perception? What are we saving? What return on investment are we giving this customer? And that allows you to then charge and sell a higher price, when you're doing that. Awesome. I saw a quick little, comment as well from from the chat of someone who who they have a set number in their, you know, clients, you know, for elderly clients or, you know, call it pro bono clients where they can do work, at a lower rate and to help the people in their community and stuff like that. And you unlock that by being really good and and and smart with your pricing everywhere else to, you know, allow you to do that. And and and I I really I love that. I love that approach. I think that's that's fantastic. Anyone have any else anything else to add to build off of what Michael was talking about there? Or I can jump back in. I I think that's a key element of landing a good price is, you know, certain you know, one thing that I say is when we're value pricing and trying to land the highest price possible on any given client, we have to be able to understand the return on investment for that client. And there's a there's different things that people value. People value, obviously, if you could help them make more money, save time, but also if you could make someone feel better. Someone's incredibly stressed about their taxes or bookkeeping or accounting, and you could eliminate that stress, that's worth a ton of money. So that's one thing I think people lose sight of in when we go through these discovery calls is understanding the levels of anxiety and stress and pain points associated with some of the things that we help with. And if we could eliminate that, then, you know, they're just automatically gonna be willing to pay more. Amazing. Awesome. So I'll jump back on to where we were at originally. Cool. So, yeah, just I guess before we kind of move on, I I you know, we started this kind of round of questions with some questions about AI. Just Michael and Logan, I don't think you had the chance to to to jump in with AI. Anything to add about leveraging AI with any part of this process, or just put, like, any any little tips or things that you've been incorporating in your firm so far? Yes. So it's it's it's always great to take what you're doing and the pricing you're doing and and try to see what AI is gonna tell you and what their thoughts are. Right? So you can really be as specific or as generic with any of the LLMs to say this is what I'm doing. This is my firm. This is how I'm pricing the type of client I'm proposing to and see what feedback it gives you. It doesn't hurt. But also it gives you maybe spark some ideas of oh, hey. Wow. I haven't really communicated the the value of this part of the service and I need to in this proposal or I I need to do an actual video call or in person to show this client the proposal and actually walk them through the value of it. So everyone takes a different approach on that, but leveraging AI to give you ideas on how to do that, versus doing just the same standard way. And if you're not getting if you don't feel like you're getting the response you want out of customers or you're not able to communicate that then leveraging it to help you do that saying be a coach to me literally telling AI be be a sales coach to me. Help me adopt get my prices to be double on average. How do I get there? You'll be surprised the ideas and the, the benefits that the AI is gonna give you. I love that, Michael. That's really I haven't heard anyone that do that that specific. But, yeah, just just help me fill my gaps in my own skill set, right, and and help me get to where I wanna be. See a few questions pop up in the chat. Just a few people asking to see a couple slides or asking for some some insight. Just keep in mind, we're gonna send out the full report that's gonna have some of the stuff we threw up on slides plus every all the all the different questions and everything that's gonna go out when you get the full report. So you'll have tons of time to dive in super, super deep on all the specific findings and pricing and everything like that. Cool. So with those kind of conversations, if you've been inspired kinda to implement some changes at your firm from things we talked about today, review around pricing, bill billing models, you know, I building conditions definitely a really great tool to help with those changes in an efficient and streamlined way. And as well, you know, if you're finding these conversations interesting, you know, wanna be part of the community and wanna access really some of Ryan's expertise in this process, I can't, recommend future firm Accelerate enough. I have a bunch of customers that I have worked at, firms that I've worked with that have gone through Accelerate and and and it's really completely overhauled the way that they approach engagements, onboarding clients, and pricing especially. As I mentioned earlier, we have a really cool bundle with Ignition and future firm Accelerate, to basically get access to both of those, on a on a really discounted rate. So you can kinda do both together. They fit really nicely together. You can kinda implement both at the same time and and and and save some money with that. So before we kinda jump in and do a quick little run through of Ignition in action, I teed a few different features I wanted to show. Just have one quick question for for the panelists, before we kinda get there. If you could give one, piece of advice to any owners that are trying to future proof their pricing strategy, anything, you one piece of advice you could give them, what would it be? I I think it comes down to we we could have all these tools and templates, and that's obviously gonna do a lot to help. But I think we still have to have a process in place to be able to understand the human side of things. And that's the big unlock. That's gonna future proof you because people wanna deal with people. They don't wanna deal with robots, and we need to be able to have good conversations with our clients and prospective clients to be able to extract the relevant information required to be able to properly price, land them on a good price, but also to deliver an excellent service that they're gonna be happy with. Yeah. I just wanna expand on what Ryan's saying. Think about the experience your customers have in your sales process. From the moment they initially hear about you all the way to signed engagement, What is that experience like, and how are you standing out as a differentiator? What are you doing to make that customer feel like they're the they're gonna be the best customer in the world for you? Then that if they come to your firm, the experiences they're gonna have is second to none. So craft actually craft and think about that experience, and there are touch points in other things you can do inside that experience that would make the customer feel really special. I'm gonna pretty much echo those points. So not only future proof, but AI proof yourself as we get more transactional. And and if AI does what it's gonna do, it's gonna take away a lot of the lower lower skilled work in our field. And so we wanna be as relational as possible and provide that human aspect. So and build build those relationships with your clients versus just trying to see them as a transaction or or a project. Amazing. Thank you. Cool. Just a quick little review of some of the resources we're gonna share out after today's webinar. We're gonna send out the recording for the whole conversation. We're gonna obviously send out the pricing benchmark reports. You can all dive into it and get a little deeper. And we're also obviously gonna share out an ax access to Logan's template and Ignition. So if you're interested in that kind of three options approach, what that looks like, and maybe just use that for some of your engagements this year. We can get you that Ignition template. So like I said before, just wanna do a quick little, quick little demo for any folks who haven't really seen Ignition in action, before today. So I'm just gonna pull that up right here. When you're engaging, this is the process they go to to, kind of, you know, see your services, understand what they're paying, all that kind of stuff. So I kicked mine off with an introduction and a little video where I get to kind of explain my services and my things. This proposal that I built has a couple different options that the client can actually pick between. So this is an example of a template where we have some quarterly services that the client can pick between Have one that's recommended. Client can make their decision, and we get all the details in here about the sets of services that we're gonna be providing. Nice and clear, kinda like an engagement letter to kind of define what's being provided within those services. And then a clear breakdown of what the client's gonna be paying. And in Ignition, we embed payments into the process. So when the client makes those selections, when they decide what kind of package they wanna go on, they can actually add their payment method indirectly and actually make this required so the client has to put their payment details in. That's what allows me to either make them pay upfront or allows me to set up an automate kinda scheduled payments. Lastly, of course, we have all the final engagement terms and conditions. So this is not just a proposal or I'm presenting something. This is actually an actionable, process where the client can actually say yes and commit to the work that we're doing together. Some additional tools we have available in Ignition. So here's an example of a client with billing schedule who maybe has signed and said yes to that, that proposal that I sent. They have quarterly payments all the way scheduled. But what happens again if something pops up that's out of scope? I want to be able to, you know, invoice that client. All I do is I come up to the top. I hit instant bill. I find the service that I want to bill the client for. I put in a price that I wanna bill for it, and then I can either bill the client directly and charge it to the cards that they have on file. I can choose arrange manually if I just want them to review this and actually click the button themselves. Or what I can also do is I can schedule this to be on the same date as a future already scheduled payment for the client schedule so that just bills them automatically. So a lot of great options to be able to quickly and efficiently invoice clients for work that was never maybe initially on their billing schedule. And a other really, really cool tool to help make payment chain or price changes really quick and efficient is our bulk pricing updates. So sometimes you wanna do a full reengagement every year to update your pricing, but sometimes you might just want to, you know, just just put in that ten percent price change automatically. Maybe that's already in your agreement when they first signed to just, update prices annually. So here's an example. I have in my account a service called financial coaching calls that right now I'm billing clients for at about a thousand dollars, or twenty five hundred dollars per month, I think it was, or a thousand dollars per quarter. Yeah. Thousand dollars per quarter. So here are my three clients I have that are currently getting charged a thousand dollars. And, you know, for October first, maybe that's when my year rolls over. I need to update these prices. I could come in on a client by client base and just say, starting October first, I wanna charge, you know, my new eleven hundred dollar price. Or, alternatively, I can just say, cool. Let's adjust this for all my clients. See if I change it to a specific number or, heck, let's just increase every single client's payment by ten percent. Heck, let's do twelve percent. Just like that, it'll update all the prices. I can hit next. I can optionally send a notification to client just letting them know that the payment their these are gonna get updated and update prices. Just like that, when October first comes around and those three quarterly services, it's time for them to bill, they are now going to get built at the higher price. I didn't have to send any I didn't need to get anything signed by the client or any changes. I just did it unilaterally from Ignition. So I hope that was a really helpful and useful kind of little sneak peek there over at Ignition. Just want to say thank you to everyone for joining today's webinar, and a huge massive thank you to all of our panelists for hopping in here, sharing ton of their wisdom and insights. Really excited to kinda hear from that. And like I said, look out for the report next week, when we set it and dive really deep into it. Thanks, everyone, again, and have a great rest of your day. Talk to you soon.