Running a Bookkeeping Practice: Client Fees, Hours per Client, Fixed vs Hourly Pricing, Deadline Calendars, Capacity & Profit per Client

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Price eight clients of a small bookkeeping office from their monthly transactions and complexity points with a fee table and XLOOKUP, add up the monthly recurring revenue and check how much of it depends on the three biggest clients.
• Compare each client's fixed monthly fee with what the hours would have cost at the hourly rate, compute the effective hourly rate per client and flag the clients whose work has outgrown their fee.
• Summarise two days of timesheet entries by client and by person with SUMIFS, compute each person's utilisation against the available hours and measure the non-billable share of the office's time.
• Turn a fictional rule book into due dates with EDATE, move dates that fall on a weekend to the next working day, set internal targets five working days earlier and add up the work due in each week of December.
• Compare the client hours needed each month with the hours the team can deliver, add up the seasonal hours to buy in and find the month with the highest load.
• Work out what each client really earns after the cost of the hours and the software, compute the practice margin, rank the clients by margin and colour the names of the clients below the target.
• Compute the fee each low-margin client would need to reach the target margin, the size of the increase, the chance of losing the client from a fictional churn table and whether the review still raises the expected profit.
• Build Ledgerwood's monthly dashboard: recurring revenue from active clients, team utilisation, the number of overdue work items counted with COUNTIFS and a chart of profit by client.