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Chasing records and rebuilding client files is work you rarely get to bill for, and it happens before anything reaches Xero, QuickBooks, Sage or FreeAgent. Put in your own numbers to see what it costs your practice, and how many hours PlatformTaxHub needs to save to pay for itself.
The threshold
At a $65 hourly cost, the plans pay for themselves at 3.3 to 4.3 hours saved per client a year.
Under 20 minutes a month, per client, across chasing records, working out gross income from payouts, fixing categories and sorting out foreign amounts. Your hourly cost and your client count will differ from that example, so put your own in below and see your own threshold.
Count all three types:
Your plan
Growth, $4,873 a year
Includes 5 extra client seats
Cleanup is costing you
$6,500 a year
Pays for itself at
The hours this has to save per client to cover its own cost. Move the sliders to try any plan against your own numbers first.
Sending this to a partner or your team?Share the calculator on its own— a link to the calculator by itself, with nothing else on the page.
We do not publish an hours-per-client figure, because we could not find a benchmark we would stand behind. What we can describe is where the time goes, and firms recognise the list: chasing documents the client already has, reconciling bank statements against platform payouts that arrived net of fees, reclassifying income and expenses out of client-invented categories, and resolving foreign amounts with no record of the rate used. None of it is billable.
The compounding factor is timing. Self-employed clients with platform income, gig workers, freelancers, creators and landlords, typically deliver everything at year-end. Whatever your per-client figure is, it lands across your whole self-employed book inside the same few weeks, precisely when capacity is already constrained by filing deadlines. The result is either unpaid overtime, delayed filings, or both.
The calculation above is only as good as the hours you put into it. It does not try to price the downstream effects, faster turnaround, more capacity without more headcount, fewer errors from pre-validated data, because we have no way to measure those for your practice. Put in the hours you actually lose and judge the result on that alone.
It depends on how you bill, and it is worth being straight about it. On a fixed fee or a monthly retainer, an hour you do not spend is margin you keep, and the capacity it frees takes on another client without another hire. On hourly billing it is the opposite: the hour you save is the hour you were going to invoice, so the gain has to come from taking on more clients rather than from the same ones.
The profession has been moving from hourly to fixed and value-based pricing for years, and this is one of the reasons why. If you are still billing self-employed clients by the hour, the calculator below will overstate what this is worth to you.
On annual billing the plans work out at roughly $279 per client seat a year on Practice, $237 on Growth and $216 on Scale. Benchmarks for practice software generally sit at $10 to $50 per client per month, so the per-seat rate is not the thing to argue with.
The thing to check is the hours. At a $65 hourly cost, those plans need to save between 3.3 and 4.3 hours per client a year to cover themselves — under 20 minutes a month, per client. That is the number the calculator above works out with your figures instead of ours, and it is the only comparison that means anything, because a practice charging $150 an hour and one charging $45 are looking at completely different thresholds.
Self-employed and small business clients whose records arrive as something other than a clean ledger: platform payouts that landed net of fees, bank statements with no categorisation, foreign amounts with no record of the rate, receipts in an envelope. The messier the intake, the more the plan returns — but the arithmetic works across a whole client book, not just the worst files, because prep time exists on every one of them.
It does not replace your software and it does not touch your workflow. Records are captured on the client’s side and arrive as a clean CSV in Xero, QuickBooks, Sage or FreeAgent format, or you read them directly in the firm dashboard.
It is not the client count that decides it, it is the hours. The plans cover their own cost at roughly 3.3 to 4.3 hours saved per client a year at a $65 hourly cost, and that ratio holds whether you have five clients or fifty, because both the cost and the saving scale with the seat count. What changes with size is which plan is cheapest for you, which the calculator picks automatically.
No. It sits in front of whatever you use. Clients capture their own income and expenses, the records are categorised and readiness-scored as they go, and you export a clean CSV in your software’s format or read the file directly in the firm dashboard. Nothing changes in your stack and there is nothing to install on either side.
It depends on how many self-employed clients you have, what an hour of your team's time costs, and how messy their records are when they arrive. There is no reliable published figure for hours per client, so the calculator uses yours. Count the time spent chasing missing records, working out gross income from platform payouts, fixing categories and sorting out foreign currency amounts, including any senior review time.
It depends on your client count and your staff cost, which is why the calculator uses yours. As a worked example: a practice with 20 self-employed clients needs the Growth plan plus five extra client seats, $4,873 a year before any optional onboarding fee. At a $65 hourly staff cost it pays for itself at about 75 hours across the year, roughly 3.7 hours per client. If your team spends more than that cleaning up each client's records, it pays for itself.