The case against per-job pricing

• Per-job prices look cheap because they price the typing, not the thinking.
• Every query, every re-do and every re-learn of the client lands back on your practice.
• The coordination load never appears on the invoice. You carry it.
• Seats move the utilisation risk to us and put coordination in one named lead. Per-job still wins for one-off backlogs and tiny volumes.

The price list is very persuasive

A set of small company accounts for £120–300. A VAT return for £25–60. A self assessment return for £15–40. Payroll at £0.55–0.70 a payslip plus RTI. Those are the offshore per-job rates we see advertised in 2026 (our reading of published price lists; more on the compare page).

Against what a practice charges, say £500–1,500 for those same accounts or £150–400 for the return (what we see in the market; our estimate), that looks like the best margin in the business. Send it out, mark it up, bank the difference.

We run a practice. We have bought per-job work. Here is where the difference went.

Every query costs

The per-job price assumes a clean file. A set of records that balances, with the bank fully reconciled, every invoice explained and the director loan agreed. If your clients send you those, congratulations, and you do not need outsourcing.

Everyone else's files generate queries. "What is this £4,000 receipt from the director?" "Is this van a company asset or a personal one?" "There are three months of missing bank statements." Each query is an email to you, a chase to the client, a reply to the provider, and a wait. The provider has moved to the next job in the meantime. Your job has lost its place in the queue.

The £200 set of accounts does not take two hours of your time. It takes two hours of theirs and forty-five minutes of yours spread over a fortnight, plus the partner's attention when the client rings to ask why it is taking so long.

Every re-do is a negotiation

Then the accounts come back and the reviewer finds something. A prepayment missed. The wrong depreciation policy. A disclosure laid out the way the provider always does it and not the way your firm does it.

Now you have a choice. Fix it yourself, in which case you are paying twice, once in cash and once in senior time. Or send it back, in which case you are about to discover what the provider's definition of "within scope" is. Per-job pricing has to protect the provider from unlimited rework, so the boundary is drawn somewhere, and every time you cross it there is a conversation.

Those conversations are not expensive individually. They are expensive because they happen on every job, and because the person having them is usually the most expensive person in your practice.

Re-learning the client every time

This is the one that really adds up. On a per-job model the provider has no reason to remember your client. The job is done, paid, closed. Next year the same client's accounts arrive and they are a new job to whoever picks them up.

So the questions come again. The same director loan. The same van. The same "why is there a balance on the suspense account". You answered all of this last year. You will answer it again next year. The provider is not being lazy; their model simply does not pay them to keep notes on your clients, so they do not.

Inside a practice, that client memory is most of what makes a good senior fast. Per-job pricing throws it away annually.

The coordination load is yours

Add it up across a year. Somebody in your practice has to: decide what to send, package it, send it, field the queries, chase the client, relay the answers, receive the work, review it, send back the corrections, argue about scope, chase the turnaround, and explain to the client why the accounts took six weeks. That is a job. It does not appear on the provider's invoice. It appears on yours, as a manager who is doing coordination instead of fee work.

Per-job pricing is cheap because it prices the production and leaves the project management with you.

What a seat changes

A seat is a different deal. You pay for a person's month, not for a list of outputs. A full Accounts seat is £2,650 a month; a full Production seat is £1,950; halves and part-times are on the pricing page.

Two things move when you do that.

First, the utilisation risk moves to us. If the work comes in lumpy, which it always does, that is our problem to smooth, not yours to pay for by the job. If a set of accounts takes longer because the file is messy, nobody sends you a scope email. It just takes longer, inside hours you have already bought.

Second, coordination moves into one named lead. You are not packaging and sending. Your seat is in your software under their own login, pulling the work from your job list, raising queries directly in the file, and building the client notes that make next year faster. The UK reviewer sits in the same loop. How it works walks through it.

The per-hour arithmetic still has to work, and it does: a full seat is 160 hours a month, which is roughly £12 an hour on a Production seat and under £17 on an Accounts seat, before you count the coordination you are no longer doing. Offshore hourly rates run £8–15 and UK-based outsourcers £25–45 an hour (published rates, 2026). The difference is that seat hours include the queries, the re-dos and the remembering.

When per-job is right

We will not pretend seats are always the answer.

• A one-off backlog. A practice you have just bought with two years of unfiled accounts. Clear it per job, then decide what standing capacity you actually need.
• Tiny volume. If your total outsourcing need is a dozen returns a year, buy a dozen returns. A part-time seat at 40 hours a month would sit idle.
• A genuine test. You want to see how a provider handles your files before committing. Send three jobs. Judge the queries, not the price.

Outside those, if you are buying per-job work every month and wondering why the saving never shows up in the accounts, it is because the saving is being spent on coordination.

Where to start

Put a year's volumes into the capacity calculator and compare the seat cost with what you are paying per job plus the hours you spend managing it. Then talk to us. If per-job is genuinely right for you, we will say so.

Published 22 August 2026. Tax rules and rates change — check current figures on gov.uk before relying on anything here. This is general information for practice owners, not advice.