Accountants and bookkeepers often underprice because they were never taught pricing fundamentals. Hourly billing leads to underpricing, surprise invoices, and burnout. Shifting to value-based pricing, where you align goals with clients and deliver measurable value, builds confidence and profitability.
If you're an accountant or a bookkeeper and you're trying to price your clients and it feels awkward and uncomfortable, maybe risky, and you're worried about losing clients if you put your prices up, then you're not alone in that feeling. If you get major imposter syndrome whenever you give your price to a potential client, it may interest you to know that actually most accountants and bookkeepers are underpricing especially if you're using an hourly rate. It kind of makes sense that you're nervous about pricing because it's likely not something that you were ever actually taught or specifically learnt. Probably you took your bookkeeping and your accounting exams and you learnt how to set up a business, but you never really thought about the pricing side of it, and it's a really important part of the equation. Accounting and bookkeeping are complex services. It's not the same as pricing a cup of coffee or a singular product. It's— there's a lot of nuance involved, and it's a complex thing to price. So think of it in this way: if you were thrown up onto a stage and asked to play a guitar solo and you've never played guitar in your life, you're going to be really nervous about doing that. You're probably going to mess it up. You're probably going to panic, and it's going to be chaos, okay? But confidence comes down to 3 things: knowledge, systems, and practice. So if you learn where to place your hands on the guitar and you learn the systems of the chord progressions and the notes to play, and you practice before you get up on that stage, then you could probably get up on the stage and knock out a decent tune. Now we tend to cling to hourly pricing because it seems the most straightforward thing to do, but hourly billing generally leads to underpricing, chasing payments, sometimes not getting paid at all because you've overworked on something that you didn't think you were going to spend that much time, so you write the price off because you don't think someone's going to pay it. You probably get a lot of complaints from clients about surprise billing because you have to wait until the end to give the price, and you think, I'm not earning enough, so I need to take on more and more clients, and you end up overworked and burnt out when you're not actually really getting very much different profit from that. So hourly billing is a crazy way to price. It's not doing you or your clients any favors. So really what we need to be doing is moving towards value pricing, and value pricing is a more efficient way to price, and it's also something that's going to give you a lot more confidence when it comes to pricing as well, because it removes you from this position of selling your services and trying to be salesy and push that on somebody. And instead what you're doing is you're working alongside the client to agree on a price point and a service that works for the both of you. When you're value pricing, it's not just about getting more money, it's about realigning those goals so that what you are focused on is delivering more value to your clients, and they will in turn pay for that value. So the first step to making those changes is having the confidence to do so. And in this course, what I'm going to be doing is addressing the common myths and mindset issues that are holding you back from making those really necessary pricing changes in your business. So we're going to tackle those, dissect them, and show you how actually your mindset is probably the biggest thing that's holding you back from making real profit. So once you change that mindset, that will give the confidence boost that you need to go ahead and make the pricing changes that your business desperately needs to. If you have any questions regarding today's video, you can leave them in the comments and we will get back to you on those as soon as we can. Alternatively, if you would like to join our community to ask those questions more directly, then you'll find the information about that below this video. Please, if you found this video helpful, leave a like, and if you want to see more like this, then you can hit the subscribe button, and we'll see you again soon on another video.
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