Published in partnership with Sage. Based on Accountancy Age’s Leading Voice Broadcast with Chris Downing and Jack Choppin from Sage.
There is a conversation happening in UK accountancy firms right now that tends to start with AI and end with pricing. It starts with a genuine observation, the tools are working, the workflows are improving, clients are getting a better service, and then it arrives at a question that most partners would rather defer. If the work is getting done faster, and clients are increasingly aware that it is getting done faster, how long does the current pricing model hold?
Chris Downing, Director for Accountants and Bookkeepers at Sage, framed this tension clearly during our recent broadcast. Clients want more from the profession than ever before, and they are willing to pay for it, because what they are paying for is not speed, it is confidence. The problem is that most firms are not pricing for confidence. They are still pricing for time, and AI is compressing time rapidly.
The structural pricing problem most firms are carrying
Jack Choppin, Senior Accountant Success Manager at Sage, spends his working days in direct conversation with UK firm owners, and the pattern he sees most consistently is one that most practice leaders will recognise immediately. Different prices for different services across different clients, set at different points in time, for reasons that made sense when they were agreed and are now difficult to revisit. The result is a pricing structure that is inconsistent across the firm, opaque to clients, and increasingly difficult to defend as AI makes the underlying work faster and more visible.
MTD is making this urgent in a way it was not before. Quarterly submissions mean quarterly client touchpoints, and each of those touchpoints is an opportunity for a client to look at what they are receiving and ask whether the value matches the fee. Firms that have not had a structured pricing conversation in the last two years are going into those touchpoints with a model designed for annual compliance cycles, and the mismatch is starting to show.
Jack was direct about what this means in practice. If you have not thought clearly about how your pricing model changes to meet the increased workload and frequency that MTD brings, and if you have not had those conversations with your clients, the commercial pressure from that workload is going to land on the firm rather than being shared appropriately with the client.
Why consistency across the firm matters more than individual pricing decisions
One of the most useful observations in the broadcast came from Chris, who identified inconsistent pricing across the firm as one of the most significant sources of lost commercial opportunity. When different partners and managers are having different pricing conversations with different clients, the firm has no mechanism for capturing the full value of what it delivers, and no ability to adjust its commercial model in response to the changes AI is introducing.
The firms moving most effectively through this period are the ones that have built a structured, and systemised price range across their services, which means that when AI starts transforming specific workflows, the firm has the ability to pull the right levers and reflect that change in what it charges. Without that structure, efficiency improvements simply reduce the cost of delivering existing services without creating any upside for the practice.
This is the same argument that applies to AI adoption more broadly. The firms seeing commercial improvement are not necessarily the ones with the most advanced tools. They are the ones with the clearest commercial framework sitting underneath those tools, so that when capacity is created, there is a model ready to capture it.
MTD as the forcing function
The Making Tax Digital transition is doing something useful for the profession, even if it does not feel that way from inside a practice managing the operational demands of quarterly submissions. It is forcing the pricing conversation that many firms have been deferring for years.
Annual compliance pricing was always a blunt instrument. It bundled together the preparation work, the advisory value, the relationship management, and the professional judgment into a single fee that clients understood as payment for a set of accounts and a tax return. MTD is unbundling that. Quarterly touchpoints make the components of the service visible in a way that annual delivery never did, and that visibility creates both a risk and an opportunity.
The risk is that clients start to perceive the compliance component as less valuable as AI makes it faster and more automated. The opportunity is that the quarterly rhythm creates four moments per year to demonstrate advisory value, provide real-time insight, and have a commercial conversation that annual billing never allowed. The firms approaching MTD as a commercial opportunity rather than a compliance burden are restructuring their pricing around what those quarterly touchpoints make possible, which is a fundamentally different relationship with the client than annual compliance delivery ever supported.
What structured pricing looks like in practice
Jack’s experience with pricing change, built over years working with firms through GoProposal, is that the firms which handle commercial model transitions well share one consistent characteristic. They do not treat pricing as a series of individual client decisions. They build a framework that applies consistently across the practice, they train every person in the firm to have the same conversation regardless of who is in the room, and they review that framework regularly as the services they deliver evolve.
In practice, that means building a clear price range for each service category that separates the compliance component from the advisory component, reflects the frequency and depth of client contact as a distinct line of value, and is reviewed at least annually as AI continues to change what the work involves. A firm charging a fixed quarterly fee for MTD submissions, a separate fee for real-time insight and cash flow commentary, and a further fee for a live review call with a senior advisor has made the value of each component visible and chargeable. A transparent commercial model is what allows the firm to adjust its pricing as the work changes, rather than absorbing that change as margin pressure, and the firms building that transparency now are the ones with the most room to move when AI continues to develop.
The firms that build this structure now will enter the next phase of AI adoption with a commercial model ready to capture the gains. The firms that defer it will find themselves in the same position they are in today, more efficient and no more profitable.
The question worth asking in your next partners meeting
Chris closed this thread in the broadcast with an observation that lands at the centre of where most firms are sitting right now. Pricing for outcomes rather than inputs is the natural response to a profession where the inputs are changing faster than the fees have been updated to reflect them, and the firms that lead that change deliberately will be in a fundamentally stronger commercial position than the ones that wait for clients to ask why the fee has not moved even though the work is visibly faster.