How to bill clients as a bookkeeper or accountant

Bookkeeping is a relationship business, and your billing should feel just as steady as your monthly close. With Fee-Lion you can put your flat retainer on a recurring invoice that pays itself, add a surcharge when tax season piles on, and bill the messy one-off cleanups from the hours you actually tracked, so you spend your time on the books instead of chasing payments.

Set up the flat monthly retainer

Most bookkeeper relationships run on a predictable monthly fee. A recurring invoice with auto-pay turns that fee into money that arrives on schedule without a single follow-up email.

1. From the left sidebar, open Invoices and choose New recurring invoice.
2. Pick the client, then add a fee line item like “Monthly bookkeeping retainer” priced as quantity 1 × your flat rate.
3. Set the cadence to Monthly and pick the day it issues, for example the 1st so it lines up with your close.
4. Turn on Auto-pay so the client’s saved card is charged automatically and the money lands in your own Stripe.
5. Save it once, and Fee-Lion bills the same clean invoice every month on its own.

Before you go heavy on recurring invoices, set your house rules once at Settings → Preferences under Payment terms, Tax, and Deposit defaults so every retainer inherits the same terms.

Tip: Ask each client to enroll their card in the portal the first time they pay. Once they’re enrolled, every monthly retainer charges itself and you never send a reminder again.

Add a busy-season surcharge

January through April, the workload spikes and your invoice should reflect it. Instead of renegotiating the whole retainer, add a temporary surcharge line.

• On the recurring invoice (or a one-off invoice for those months), add a surcharge line item such as “Tax-season workload surcharge.”
• Keep the base retainer line untouched so the client sees exactly what’s normal and what’s seasonal.
• When the busy stretch ends, remove the surcharge line and the invoice returns to its flat fee.

This keeps your pricing transparent: clients see a steady base fee with a clearly labeled bump only when the season demands it.

Bill ad-hoc cleanup from tracked time

Catch-up work, prior-year cleanup, and untangling a shoebox of receipts don’t fit a flat fee. Track those hours and bill them on top.

1. Open Time in the sidebar and log your cleanup hours, either with the timer or as a manual entry, at your hourly rate.
2. When you’re ready to bill, create or open the client’s invoice and pull the unbilled time onto it as task line items (hours × rate).
3. Send it, or let it ride alongside the next retainer invoice so the client gets one clean statement.

Now the predictable retainer and the variable cleanup live side by side, each priced honestly, and every billable hour makes it onto an invoice.

Keep an eye on what’s owed

Even with auto-pay, a card occasionally declines. Open Reports and check invoice aging to catch anything that slipped, then send a reminder in a click. The ops dashboard gives you a quick read on monthly recurring revenue across your whole book of clients.

What’s next

• Set up a monthly retainer with recurring invoices
• Turn on auto-pay
• Bill tracked time to an invoice
• Stay ahead of aging