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I have spoken to many bookkeepers over the years who would like to charge their clients a fixed monthly fee but are filled with fear.  I hope this short post will help you put those fears you feel to one side and look seriously at how charging a fixed fee could help your business to grow.

Most fears tend to come from a single area.  Bookkeepers fear that they will end up providing far more services than the client pays for.

Charging clients a fixed monthly fee is a fantastic way to:

• Earn more m…

One of questions I get asked most often is ‘How do I come up with a fixed price?’  When a bookkeeper, like yourself, stops selling their time and start selling their expertise this is the biggest hurdle they will face.  How do you remain competitive and avoid working for nothing.

One of the easiest ways to devise a fixed price, while still retaining the link to time, is to work out how long it takes you, on average, to deal with a client’s transaction.  You should include in this calculation the …

When you set up your own bookkeeping practice it is vitally important to get to grips with just who your ideal client is.  This will be determined a lot by how you want to work, onsite or offsite, hourly or fixed rates, locally or remote and loads of other questions you need to answer first.

If you don’t know who you are marketing your services to, it will be really difficult to find them, and very expensive.  You’ll end up with the scattergun approach which will leave you trying to be everything…

http://youtu.be/EpHbwGRhf4A

Watching this dog chase it's own tail is pretty funny....admit it. We all know that no matter how fast the dog goes, or how hard he tries he can never win, but...

we do it all the time

Hours are wasted every day chasing our tails with pointless tasks in our business.  We will then sit and wonder why we never get anywhere.  But why do we do it?  The answer is not as complicated as it seems.  We do it....

For the same reason as the dog above

We think that it's the right thin…

If you’ve watched some of my webinars, or read my blogs on fixed prices you’ll know that one of the things I talk a lot about is systemising your services.  But what do I mean?

By systemising your services I really mean creating a rulebook, it’s your game after all.  Not just the rules about how you do your bookkeeping but how you run your business.  If you’re anything like I used to be all of these rules are in your head right now.  But maybe like me, you forget some from time to time, or ignore…

Today we caught up with Kate Brown who runs the successful Stenson Office Services in Derby.  Kate had a varied career before becoming a bookkeepers with roles as diverse as working for Harrods and the British Army.  After gaining invaluable experience of small business finance within a construction firm, she set up her bookkeeping business in Derby four years ago.  She is a member of the Institute of Certified Bookkeepers and when she's not busy helping business owners with their finance she ca…

One of the first questions asked by new bookkeepers regarding their own accounts is can I claim my training costs as an expense. This is a complex area so lets walk through it slowly.

As a sole trader, the training you gain to enable you to start a business is an enduring asset of the business. It’s something that will allow the business to generate income over a prolonged period of time. The fact that training isn’t tangible doesn’t make it any less of an asset to the business. This is where the…

Time is money. Has there ever been a more dangerous or misleading phrase in the history of the world for entrepreneurs?

Time is not money. Time is not a commodity. We can't save time in the bank, or earn time back. We can't horde time in the corner, or under this mattress.

Time is not money, value is money.

If you remember nothing else from this article, remember this: "People buy what you do, not how long it took you to do it."

Think about that.

If it were true that time is money then …

When I talk to bookkeepers about their pricing, something that comes up time and again is raising fees. There is a certain resistance to this by bookkeepers. More often than not when the topic is discussed I hear things like "My clients won't pay any more" or "If I raise my prices they'll leave."

This is one of those times when the fear of doing something is a lot worse than actually doing it.

We often convince ourselves that bad things will happen, so avoid it at all costs. Our clients are al…

With so many bookkeepers scared to make the move from hourly rates to fixed fees I decided to write another short article highlighting the problems of trading your time for money.

While most would accept that charging by the hour seems so simple for the more risk averse bookkeepers, there are also some major flaws with this approach. There is no upside to increasing your efficiency or investing in newer technology. 

The more efficient you become, the longer and harder you’ll need to work to co…