How AI is forcing accounting firms to rewrite the pricing rules  

AI is forcing the accounting profession to rethink something far more fundamental than workflows. It is forcing firms to rethink the very logic they use to price. For years the industry has talked about moving from hours to value, yet most pricing still quietly anchors itself to time. More effort meant more cost. More complexity meant a higher fee. And if a task became quicker, the benefit was usually absorbed rather than passed on or restructured. AI cuts straight through that logic. It does not replace accountants. It replaces the parts of accounting that used to justify certain pricing behaviours. 

During a recent panel I hosted for the Accountex Virtual with Sarah Gardener of Shaw Gibbs, Stuart Grosvenor of HB&O and Paul Clarke of Ookkee, the clearest signal was that AI is not just a tech shift. It is an economic one. It changes what work looks like, what it costs to deliver and what clients are really paying for. And it means firms now face a choice – redesign their pricing model or be slowly overtaken by the work their own technology has made cheaper to produce. 

One of the big changes already happening is the move towards transactional pricing. Ten years ago it felt niche. Today it is quietly becoming the backbone of modern, tech forward firms.  HB&O use transaction counts to manage scope and protect margin. Paul went further, explaining that Ookkee prices all clients this way because business owners want clarity and consistency. They do not want a mystery box of hours and assumptions. They want to know what they are paying for and why. 

The interesting thing is that AI strengthens the case for transaction pricing rather than undermines it. Transactions do not disappear just because AI processes them faster. They remain the economic foundation of bookkeeping and financial operations. What is changing is the cost to serve. If AI halves the work involved in processing transactions, the temptation for weaker firms will be to halve the price. That would be a mistake. Faster delivery does not diminish value. It enhances it. The speed, accuracy and consistency AI brings can make financial information more useful, more timely and more actionable. Clients do not buy minutes. They buy momentum. 

This is where the next fault line appears. Software costs are no longer something you can hide inside general overheads. They are now a meaningful part of the cost to deliver each client. Yet many firms still treat software as an internal burden rather than a client facing resource. Sarah pointed out that some major products in the US have increased in price by more than 600 percent in recent years, and many practices are still absorbing these rises rather than passing them through or building margin on top. This makes no sense. If software is a core ingredient of the service, it should be priced like any other ingredient. Tradespeople have been doing this forever. Margin on labour and margin on materials. The question comes – should accounting firms adopt the same lens?  Firms that cling to the belief that software should always be sold on at cost will simply watch their margins quietly disappear. 

The complexity climbs further when you factor in agentic AI. Tools that perform tasks automatically in the background, chain tasks together, interpret data and make decisions about what to do next. Agents will not be free. Vendors will eventually charge for them and those models are mostly still unknown. It could be per action, like Zapier. It could be capacity based. It could be bundle based. Whatever it becomes, the firms who flourish will be the ones who look this reality in the eye and build agent activity into their pricing model instead of hoping vendors keep it cheap. It also means positioning agents as part of the service, not something hidden in the back office. Clients should see the benefit. If their work is being done by an intelligent system that delivers speed and consistency, they should understand that value and the firm should stand behind it rather than pretend it is simply a faster human. 

The bigger challenge is that cost to serve is now moving at a pace most firms cannot measure. New tools appear every week. Old tools become obsolete in the time it takes for a quarterly billing review. Practice management systems, bureau payroll tools and internal AI layers all carry costs that cannot simply be passed through to clients. Even Stuart admitted that if he understood his true cost to serve last month, he is not sure he does today. That is the reality of the AI era. Cost models decay fast. Firms that have historically reviewed their pricing annually will find themselves outpaced before the next review even arrives. 

This brings us to the most important shift of all. Firms can no longer price the input. They must price the outcome. AI makes the invisible visible. If it now takes five minutes to complete something that once took an hour, clients will eventually work that out. The answer is not to lower the price. The answer is to raise the value. Faster does not mean cheaper. Faster means better. Faster means more accurate. Faster means more useful for decision making. Faster means your accountant has more time to ask better questions, challenge assumptions and guide decisions. The work does not lose worth. It gains weight. 

This is why the consensus is that the old pricing playbook is no longer fit for purpose. The firms that will thrive from here are the firms that redesign their model from the ground up. They will treat transactional pricing as a foundation rather than a feature. They will rethink how software is costed and whether margin should be added. They will prepare for agent based pricing and be transparent about how agents support their service. They will invest in understanding true cost to serve in real time. And they will reposition their service so the conversation is no longer about minutes saved but impact created. 

AI will make firms faster. It will not automatically make them more profitable. That depends entirely on whether firms rewrite their pricing playbook now or wait until their margins tell them it is already too late. 

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