Freelance Accounting: How to Price and How to Handle Several Clients

This is written for accountants who want to work independently, or to take on a few files alongside a permanent job. It focuses on the three areas where most mistakes happen: pricing, defining scope, and running several clients at once during the crowded months.

Why mispricing is the usual problem

Most newly independent accountants copy a price from the market without knowing what services that figure covers. They sign a flat monthly fee, and then tax defence, year-end close and responding to an assessment all get added on top with no extra income. The issue is not the price; it is the scope.

Price on workload and risk

Company size is a poor indicator. A high-turnover trading company may generate a hundred documents a month while a small shop generates a thousand. Use these drivers to estimate hours instead.

Do not underestimate the last row. A client who hands over organised, complete documents takes half the time of one who arrives with a bag of receipts. Give new clients a one-page guide on how to hand over documents at the first meeting, and reference it in the contract.

Calculating your floor rate

1. Write down your target annual income.
2. Add annual fixed costs: software, internet, travel, training, office.
3. Add an estimate of your own tax and insurance.
4. Count real working weeks after holidays and leave.
5. Estimate billable hours per week realistically, usually about sixty per cent of working hours.
6. Divide the total of steps 1 to 3 by total billable hours to get your floor rate.
7. Estimate monthly hours per client and multiply by the rate.
8. Add ten to fifteen per cent for unplanned work.

Pricing models

In practice the hybrid works best: a monthly retainer for routine work, plus separate fees for the annual return, assessment defence and special projects.

Put the scope in writing

Most fee disputes come from unclear scope. At a minimum, make these explicit:

• What the monthly fee includes and, just as importantly, what it excludes.
• The document volume the price assumes and the mechanism for adjusting it.
• The client's duty to deliver documents on time and the effect of their delay on your deadlines.
• Whether attending an assessment meeting is inside the fee or priced separately.
• Data and software ownership, and full handover at the end of the engagement.
• Confidentiality and termination terms on both sides.

Tax-sensitive contract clauses are covered in contracts from a tax perspective, and the client view of your pricing is worth understanding from outsourced accounting versus hiring.

Running several clients

The constraint in Iran is rarely client count; it is simultaneous deadlines, since annual filing seasons hit every file at once.

1. One calendar: every deadline for every client in a single calendar, not scattered files.
2. One routine: the same chart of accounts logic, folder structure and report template across clients, to reduce mental switching.
3. Capacity sized on peak season: measure your limit against the busiest filing month, not a quiet one.

Build a fixed monthly reporting template, modelled on the monthly management report. A standard template cuts your time and makes the value of your work visible to the client.

Your own tax position

Professional service income is business income with its own obligations: registering a file, keeping income and expense records, and filing annually within the deadline. Corporate clients may withhold tax on your fee and issue a certificate, which is credited against your final liability. Foreign-currency and overseas clients raise separate issues. If your own turnover is small, simplified filing forms may also be available, on conditions announced each year.

When to raise your price

• When a client's volume has grown twenty to thirty per cent above the contracted basis.
• When an out-of-scope service has quietly become a monthly habit.
• At the start of each year, at least in line with the inflation in your own costs.

Announce increases in writing a few weeks ahead and include a summary of what you delivered over the past year. Clients rarely object to an increase that arrives with evidence of work behind it.

If you would like to review your fee structure and service agreement together, I am glad to help.

Key takeaways

• Price on workload and risk, never on company size.
• Derive your floor rate from target income and genuinely billable hours.
• A hybrid retainer plus project fees fits most engagements.
• Unclear scope is the single biggest source of disputes and unpaid work.
• Size capacity around peak season and keep your own filings in order.