We know you like fixed monthly pricing. This article explains how we make it work by reviewing the level of service you're receiving each quarter to check it fits the bill.
If you’re using our monthly services (bookkeeping, payroll, accounts payable/receivable, Xero and CFO plans), you’ll be on a monthly fee.
This fee is fixed, which means you can budget with certainty, you won’t be whacked with an unexpected fee and a hidden cost won’t jump out and bite you either. You also won’t be locked in - you can cancel with a month’s notice (or two months for CFO services).
So we can provide you with this fixed fee service, we have a Fair Use Pricing Policy sitting behind it. It’s based on keeping things fair for you and us, as the volume of transactions and services we’re providing change so will the pricing (don’t worry, we’ll always let you know about this first).
A big part of the policy is our client quarterly review (CQR) process. Basically, this means that every three months we review the service you’re receiving to see if it’s in line with the price and plan you’re on. You can read more below but in a nutshell, we look back at the last three months to see if we need to reset your fees moving forward. If you’ve been consistently busier, then your business is growing (awesome!) so our efforts will too. Here’s how it works.
CLIENT QUARTERLY REVIEW - BOOKKEEPING SERVICE
Bookkeeping pricing is based on the number of transactions we’re processing for you.
We monitor transaction volumes processed through Dext and Xero each month. Every three months, we review it more closely using the detailed ‘Account Transactions’ report within Xero, your Dext usage and our internal timesheets.
If your transaction volumes have regularly exceeded your plan (on a rolling average for the last three months), we’ll increase your plan to the right level.
This usually takes effect from then on, which means we won’t charge you for the extra transactions in the previous three months (but we do reserve the right to apply the extra charge retrospectively in excessive cases). And of course, we’ll let you know as we put you up a level.
You can always see our latest pricing on our website.
Note that we typically allow a 10% tolerance level around the number of transactions, so we won't increase the price until you are (on average over the 3 months) 10% above the prior level.
We do also, in parallel, review the ongoing efficiency of our processing and where we believe efficiencies are possible because of the nature of your transactions we will take this into consideration and let you know where this has been possible when conducting our review.
Please remember that when we increase prices we have already been processing higher volumes on average over the previous three months that we, typically, do not charge for. Can''t be fairer than that. Fixed, Simple, Fair.
CLIENT QUARTERLY REVIEW - PAYROLL SERVICE
As you grow your team, there’s an increasing effort involved in looking after them with leave entitlements, filing obligations with ATO and HMRC, super/pension lodgements and end-of-year reporting.
It sounds complicated but we’re here to make it easy. Our pricing is easy too, and it even gets cheaper per person as your team grows - you can see the pricing breakdown on our website.
As you tell us about new employees, we’ll simply run with it and add them to the payroll. Like our bookkeeping service, we review payroll at the end of each quarter to pick up any employees who have been added and increase your plan moving forward, if need be.
At the same time, we’ll also review your Xero subscription. Xero’s subscription levels are set at 5, 10, 20, 50 and 100 employees. If you’ve reached a new level during the quarter, we’ll apply that going forward too.
CLIENT QUARTERLY REVIEW - ACCOUNTS PAYABLE/RECEIVABLE
The pricing of these services depends heavily on the level of interaction with suppliers, and the effort required to chase customers.
When you hire us for these services, we’ll have agreed on a price based on our estimate of the work involved. Usually this is something like an extra half, one or 1.5 hours per week, alongside your bookkeeping plan.
As part of our quarterly review, we’ll review this to see if our actual effort matches what we agreed. If it’s been consistently higher over the last three months, we’ll discuss it with you. There might be things we can to keep it within the agreed price or if not, we can discuss resetting the price from that point on.
CLIENT REVIEW - CFO SERVICES
The pricing for our CFO services is based on the time and expertise involved.
You can see the pricing for our CFO Grow, CFO Grow + and CFO Partner plans on our website, along with what each one involves.
Because this is a close, personally delivered service, it’ll be clear to everyone how much work is being done and whether it reflects the plan you’ve chosen.
Your CFO will discuss any changes along the way and let you know if they think you need to adjust the plan, moving forward.
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We hope this article explains our client quarterly review process and how we use it to keep our pricing fair, for you and us. We want things to be as clear as possible, and we’ve put a lot of work into making that happen.
Please let us know if you’d like to chat about any of this. You can reach out to our practice manager on practice@standardledger.co any time.