A fee review you can run in one free week: how to triage a client book into leave, raise and let go, and why the 2027 MTD threshold drop is the trigger.
Ask a practice owner when they last reviewed fees across the whole book and the honest answer is usually "in bits, whenever someone complained about the price or a job obviously grew." A proper review — sit down with the client list, look at fee against actual hours, decide what moves — needs an uninterrupted run at it. Half a day is not enough; you lose the thread every time the phone rings. A full week, with nothing else booked against it, is what it actually takes for a book of any size.
That week never turns up on its own. Production work does not pause to let it happen, and an owner who is also doing bookkeeping, chasing records and preparing returns cannot simply decide to be unavailable for five days. So the review gets pushed to "after January", then to "after the April peak", then it is next January again and the fees are the same as they were two years ago while costs have not stood still.
The fix is not motivation. It is capacity. Cover the production for one week and the review happens, because the thing stopping it was never the will to do it.
Not a quiet spell in the calendar — those are rare and unplannable. What it needs is someone else on the phones, the bank recs and the queries for five working days, so the owner's diary genuinely has nothing in it that has to be them. A Production seat covers this directly: it is a named person doing the practice's processing work every week regardless, so asking it to run solo for one specific week rather than alongside the owner is not an extra cost, only a different week (back office, pricing).
Tell the team the week is coming, hand over anything that needs a decision before it starts, and set a rule for the week itself: nothing gets escalated unless it would wait until Monday anyway. Most practices that try this find the week survives fine without them, which is itself useful information about how much of the daily interruption was actually necessary.
The mistake that turns a fee review into a string of awkward phone calls is treating the whole book the same way. Sort it into three piles first, and the conversations get much easier because each pile only needs one kind of conversation.
Clients whose fee is close to what the work actually costs, once you price your time properly. Raising these gains little and costs goodwill you may want later. Leave them and move on — the discipline here is resisting the urge to raise everyone by the same percentage because it feels tidier.
Clients whose fee has fallen behind the work. This happens for ordinary reasons: turnover grew, a second bank account appeared, they added a subsidiary, or the fee was set five years ago and never moved while everything else did. Rank this pile by the size of the gap, not alphabetically, and work down it. The client who is £600 a year underpriced is worth the conversation before the client who is £60 underpriced.
Clients who will not pay a fair price and never will, however the conversation is framed. Every book has some. Counting them properly — hours actually spent against fee actually charged — usually reveals more of these than an owner expects, because underpriced clients tend to also be the ones who call the most. Letting five of these go can free more capacity than raising fifty other fees by ten pounds a month.
Making Tax Digital for Income Tax is already mandatory for sole traders and landlords with qualifying income above £50,000, from 6 April 2026. The threshold drops further on 6 April 2027: anyone with qualifying income of £30,000 or more for the 2025-26 tax year has to join from that date (gov.uk, find out if and when you need to use Making Tax Digital for Income Tax). Qualifying income is total turnover from self-employment and property before expenses, based on the return already filed for the year before.
That is a genuine change in the work for a specific, identifiable group: every sole trader and landlord client between roughly £30,000 and £50,000 of turnover moves from one self assessment return a year to digital record-keeping plus four quarterly updates a year, in MTD-compatible software. The fee that covered a single annual return does not cover four submissions and the bookkeeping discipline that quarterly reporting demands. That is not a reason to raise every fee in the book — it is a reason to run pile two, above, against this specific client list first, because the increase is tied to a real change in what you are doing for them and is easy to explain in one sentence: "your return is becoming four returns, and the fee needs to reflect that."
Pull that list now, before the April 2027 date is a deadline rather than a plan. Practices that leave it until the quarter before are having the fee conversation and the software onboarding conversation with the same client in the same month, which is a harder sell than doing them eighteen months apart.
Illustrative, using our own published rates, not a claim about any real client. A sole-practitioner book of 180 clients at an average fee of £1,250, triaged over one free week.
| Pile | Clients | Action | Annual effect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Leave alone | 95 | No change | — |
| Raise — general drift | 48 | Average fee up £110 | +£5,280 |
| Raise — MTD ITSA scope | 22 | Average fee up £240 to cover quarterly submissions | +£5,280 |
| Let go | 15 | Disengaged, capacity freed | −£13,500 fee, hours reclaimed |
| Net fee change | 180 | — | +£10,560 - £13,500 = −£2,940 in billed fees |
The headline fee total actually falls slightly, and that is the point worth sitting with. The fifteen clients who left were costing more in hours than they paid, so the practice is down £2,940 in billed fees and up in the hours those fifteen clients used to absorb — hours that now go to the seventy clients who just got a fair fee, or to the advisory work the practice was too stretched to offer them. A fee review measured only on the top line looks like it failed. Measured on hours reclaimed against fee received, it is the opposite. Put your own client count and average fee into the capacity calculator to see the shape of it for your book.
Pull the client list first: everyone with turnover near the £30,000 to £50,000 MTD ITSA band, sorted by how underpriced they look against the hours they take. Then work out what a free week actually costs you in covered production hours with the capacity calculator, and read what a part-qualified really costs if the alternative you are weighing is hiring rather than a seat. When you are ready to book the week, get in touch and we will cover production while you run the review. We muck in on the phones that week; you keep the pen on the fee.
Published 22 September 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.
Once a year across the whole book, not in the ad-hoc way most practices actually do it — reacting only when a job obviously grows or a client complains. An annual review, run as one deliberate week rather than squeezed between other jobs, catches the fees that have quietly fallen behind because a client's turnover grew, their affairs got more complex, or the fee was simply never revisited since it was set. Outside the annual round, reprice a client immediately when the scope of the work changes materially — a new subsidiary, a VAT registration, or a move onto quarterly Making Tax Digital reporting — rather than waiting for the next scheduled review.
No. A flat percentage rise across the whole book raises correctly-priced clients for no reason and under-corrects the clients who are badly underpriced, which wastes the goodwill cost of the conversation on the wrong people. Triage first: leave clients whose fee already reflects the work, raise the ones where fee has fallen behind hours — ranked by the size of the gap, not alphabetically — and disengage the small number who will not pay a fair price however the conversation is framed. A targeted review on a third of the book usually recovers more revenue, and causes far less friction, than an across-the-board rise.
Sole traders and landlords with qualifying income — turnover from self-employment and property, before expenses — between roughly £30,000 and £50,000. Anyone in that band has to move onto Making Tax Digital for Income Tax from 6 April 2027, based on income already reported for the 2025-26 tax year, which turns one annual return into digital record-keeping plus four quarterly submissions. That is a genuine increase in the work, easy to explain to the client in one sentence, and worth pulling out as a specific list rather than folding into a general fee round. Clients already above £50,000 moved onto MTD from 6 April 2026 and should already be repriced if they were not at the time.
Stop trying to fit it around production and cover production instead. A proper review of a client book needs an uninterrupted run at the fee list — a day is not enough, because the thread breaks every time the phone rings with a client query. Most practices never get the week because nobody else is covering the desk while it happens. The practical fix is to have someone else run the practice's day-to-day processing for that specific week, so the owner's diary has genuinely nothing in it that has to be them. It does not need a quiet fortnight; it needs one week with production handled by somebody else.
Usually not, and the arithmetic is more favourable than it feels in the moment. A client who is significantly underpriced is, by definition, taking more hours than they are paying for — hours that come from somewhere, usually the owner's own week or a production team that could otherwise be doing profitable work. Letting go of a small number of the most underpriced clients typically frees more capacity than a modest fee increase across the rest of the book, and that capacity can go to correctly-priced clients or to advisory work. The fee total on the top line may fall slightly; the hours reclaimed against the fee received almost always improve.
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