Professional services
Fourteen staff should not cost twice what eight does.
Practice management is priced per user, so a firm that grows has raised its software bill proportionally for software that does exactly what it did before. Karbon publishes US$59 to US$99 per user per month, which is more honest than most and still per user.
The deeper problem is fit.Every firm has a compliance calendar, a workflow and a client structure of its own, and every product ships with somebody else’s.
The structure problem
Most products flatten the thing your practice is organised around.
An accounting practice does not have customers. It has groups: a family, four trusts, two companies and a self-managed fund, all connected, all with different deadlines, all effectively one relationship for billing and none of it for compliance.
Most practice products model a client as a row. Firms then keep the real structure in a partner’s head, or in a spreadsheet, which is exactly the kind of knowledge that leaves when somebody retires.
The number partners actually want
Recovery, work in progress, and who is carrying the load.
Ask a partner what they need from practice software and it is rarely a feature. It is recovery rate by client and by job, work in progress that is accurate rather than optimistic, and an honest view of who is quietly carrying more work than they should be.
Those are reports, and reports are the first thing a generic product ships in a shape that nearly fits. Nearly fitting is how a firm ends up with a monthly export and somebody’s afternoon.
The scope
What gets built, and what we leave alone.
What we build for a firm
- Client groups with the real structure: entities, relationships, and who signs what
- Your compliance calendar, with the deadlines that actually apply to each entity
- Jobs and workflow in your words, with the stages your firm genuinely uses
- Time and work in progress, with recovery visible before the invoice rather than after
- Document requests and client chasing that does not require a partner to write the email
- Capacity and workload, so you can see who is carrying what before they tell you
- Xero and lodgement integration, left where it belongs
What we will not build
- Tax calculation or ATO lodgement. Certified software exists and the certification is the point
- Legal trust accounting, which is state legislated and audited
- Document automation where the legal templates carry professional liability
- Email. Keep the mail client you have; the system should manage work, not your inbox
The pattern across every industry we work in. Regulated or certified work stays with the specialist. The way your firm actually runs is the part nobody else can sell you, and it is the part worth owning.
The sum
Per user, per month, times sixty.
Do it on your own number
Count the practice management licence, the document tool, the client portal, the e-signing and the time tracker. Most firms run five and think of it as two.
Common questions
Answered plainly.
How much does practice management software cost?
Karbon publishes Team at US$59 per user per month paid annually or US$79 monthly, and Business at US$89 or US$99. That is one of the few in this category that publishes at all. Eight staff on Team annually is US$28,320 over five years.
When does building your own make sense for a firm?
Broadly past fifteen staff, or earlier if your workflow keeps getting bent to fit the product. Under about eight staff the sums rarely work and we will tell you so.
Can it handle client group structures?
Yes, and it is usually the reason a firm calls. Entities, trusts, funds and the relationships between them modelled properly, rather than flattened into a list with the real structure living in a partner's head.
Do you build tax or lodgement software?
No. Tax calculation and ATO lodgement stay with certified products, because that certification is exactly what you are paying for. We build the practice workflow around them.
What about legal firms and trust accounting?
Same answer as real estate: trust accounting is state legislated and audited, so it stays with a specialist. Matter management, deadlines, workflow and reporting are all fair game.
Where to next
Bring the report somebody rebuilds every month.
Twenty minutes. Show us the export and the spreadsheet it feeds, and we will tell you honestly whether a build is worth it for a firm your size. You keep the numbers either way.