Not about cutting staff.
About the same team taking 40% more clients.
This profession has a capacity problem, not a demand problem — you can't hire fast enough to take on more engagements. Scalebook handles exactly the work that consumes the most hours and bills the least.
Why this shows up on your P&L
Accounting and tax practices run at industry-benchmark gross margins of roughly 40–55%, and the dominant lever is not billing rate — it is staff utilisation. Firms above 75% utilisation show roughly twice the margin of those below 60%.
Bookkeeping is the enemy of utilisation: high hours, low billable value, and nothing left to delegate further down. Automating it puts the same people back on work that bills properly.
| Item | Amount | Note |
|---|---|---|
| You charge an SME client | HK$4,000 / month | Typical for 50–200 transactions |
| Of which labour is roughly | HK$2,000 / month | Implied by a 40–55% gross margin |
| Scalebook target saving | 30–50% of bookkeeping hours | To be measured on your clients, not assumed |
| Capacity released | HK$600–1,000 / month / client | Take it as margin, or use it to carry more clients |
Cross-client signals that are invisible one client at a time
This is the real value of a firm-level view — not "the same tool, many times".
The same suspicious bank account
One new account number appearing on invoices at three different clients. Client by client, each looks like "the supplier changed banks". Together, it's a fraud in progress.
Close status at a glance
Six clients haven't closed August, and all six are stuck on the same thing. One batch reminder instead of six separate checks.
Firm-level default coding
Your practice has a house treatment for certain supplier types. Set it once, apply it across every client it fits — and every new hire inherits that judgment on day one.
Honestly: this screen isn't built yet
The firm console sits later on our roadmap, because the first job is getting the single-company product to a standard an auditor accepts. But the data structures behind it exist from day one — so it's a scheduling question, not a rewrite.
Per client entity per month. Never per seat.
Why per entity
Because it is the unit you already bill your clients in. You can work out whether it pays without building a spreadsheet.
And when you take on another client we automatically earn more — our revenue is tied to your growth, which is the incentive we should have.
Why not per seat
Seat pricing makes firms do two things: minimise seats, and share logins.
The first cuts our revenue; the second destroys the audit trail — and the audit trail is the entire reason this product exists. So we won't price that way.
There is no price list, and that's deliberate
Nobody has been asked what they would pay, so publishing a price now would be a guess. We intend to set pricing with the first three to five firms: measure the real hours saved, then work backwards to a number both sides find fair. If you'd like a hand in that, now is the moment.
Three things we will not do
Go around you to your clients
Clients you introduce are yours. We won't sell direct into your book — and that goes in the contract, not just a conversation.
Take a revenue share
Revenue share sounds like partnership; in practice it hands your pricing structure to us. What you charge your clients is your business. We bill you per entity.
Ask for exclusivity
We won't require you to use only us, or to stop using anyone else. A product that needs an exclusivity clause to keep customers isn't good enough yet.
We're looking for three to five Hong Kong practices
Two to twenty people is the right size: decisions happen quickly, and the client mix is varied enough to tell us whether this generalises or only fits one kind of company.
Design partners pay nothing. What we want in exchange is three things: a set of real (de-identified) client documents, an hour a week of opinion, and a measured hours-saved figure — which then becomes the only claim we're willing to make in public.
We reply personally. No newsletter, no drip sequence — your address is used to talk to you about this and nothing else.