Bookkeeping pricing and fee proposal template: a fixed fee the client can compare, sign and never be surprised by.
A two-page proposal: what you understand about the client’s business, the scope line by line, three packages side by side, one-off set-up, exclusions, how fees change, payment terms and acceptance. Free, no email required.
How should a bookkeeper price and present their fees?
State the assumptions the fee is based on (accounts, transactions, employees, GST frequency), list every service with whether it is included and how often, show two or three packages side by side with transaction and payroll limits, and write down what happens when a client outgrows a package. Then put the exclusions and the payment terms on the same page as the signature. In 6,190 positive publicly posted reviews of NZ accounting and bookkeeping practices, value for fees is praised in only 7.0% (tenth of eleven traits) while proactive advice is praised in 42.2%. Clients do not thank you for being cheap. They thank you for telling them things before they needed to ask, and they remember a fee that changed without warning.
The job this document is doing.
- —The fee was quoted on a guess at transaction volume and the real number was double
- —Three months in, the client is sending payroll questions nobody priced for
- —The fee goes up and the client finds out on the invoice
- —“Bookkeeping” meant different things to the two parties, and neither wrote it down
Open it and use it today.
- 01Section 1: what we understand about your business, the assumptions the fee rests on
- 02Scope of services table: ten common services, included or not, frequency
- 03Three packages with transaction and payroll limits, report cadence and response time
- 04One-off set-up, catch-up and migration fees
- 05What is not included, and the hourly rate for work caused by late records
- 06How the fee changes: quarterly check, two months over the limit, notice given
- 07Payment terms, what the practice needs from the client, and acceptance
Free to use and adapt for your own business. Not legal advice: check contract terms against your own terms of trade and, where it matters, with a lawyer.
Why this document, and not another one.
| Measure (NZ accounting and bookkeeping) | Figure | Rank among 11 praised traits |
|---|---|---|
| Value for fees praised, positive reviews | 7.0% | 10th |
| Proactive advice praised, positive reviews | 42.2% | 4th |
| Overcharging or fees mentioned, negative reviews | About 2% |
From 7,571 publicly posted customer reviews of 484 NZ accounting and bookkeeping practices, collected October 2026. Each review carries a single star rating: 4 or 5 stars counted as positive (n=6,190), 2 stars or fewer as negative (n=328, reported as rank order rather than precision, so negative-review figures are rounded). Praise and complaint traits were coded against a fixed taxonomy; no business is named. Full corpus, method and thresholds: the accounting & bookkeeping methodology page. Full findings: the accounting & bookkeeping research study.
Use it alongside
New client onboarding checklist for accountants and bookkeepers
Before the engagement, access and information, expectations in writing, and the first 30 days.
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