About a third of the NZ accounting and advisory sites I look at publish a figure somewhere. The rest publish a contact form and a promise to tailor something. Both camps are certain the other one is losing work, and both are partly right. What follows is about how the page performs - what happens to enquiries when the number is there, what happens when it is not, and the compromises most firms land on.
I have sat in two boardrooms in the same Auckland suburb, three weeks apart, and heard identical certainty pointed in opposite directions. One managing partner said publishing fees was the change that stopped his practice losing Tuesdays to tyre-kickers. The other said it would hand competitors a price list and turn a professional service into a shelf item.
Neither was arguing from data. Both were arguing from their last bad experience - a client who ground them down on price, or a prospect who never rang back because they could not tell whether the firm was in their league.
Compliance-led practices and newer advisory firms tend to publish something. Long-established generalists mostly do not, and have never revisited it.
Strip out the feeling and the question is narrower than it sounds. You are not deciding whether to have prices. You are deciding who does the filtering, and when.
Keep the number off the site and the filtering happens in the meeting, done by a partner at their most expensive hour, twenty minutes at a time. Put it on the site and the filtering happens before the enquiry exists, done by a stranger who has no way to ask you anything.
That is the entire trade. Cheap filtering, early, by someone holding very little information. Expensive filtering, late, by someone who can adjust in real time. Once partners see it in those terms, the argument usually stops being about principle and starts being about capacity.
The reliable effect of publishing a figure is that enquiry volume falls and the survivors arrive further along. Someone who read a number and filled in the form anyway has already decided you are plausibly affordable, so the first call opens at scope rather than at what do you charge.
How far volume falls varies more than anyone would like. One firm I worked with lost about a third of its form submissions and saw no change in engagements won. Another lost a similar share and felt it, because part of what left was good work that happened to be shopping carefully that month.
The metric that matters is not enquiries. It is engagements won, and hours burnt on the enquiries that were never going to convert.
There is a cost inside that filtering, and it is easy to miss because it never reaches your inbox.
A published figure removes your chance to reframe. A prospect who reads it and decides it is high has no way of knowing it covers work their current accountant bills separately, or that the cheaper firm down the road quotes low and adds later. In a meeting that is one sentence. On a page you get no reply.
Firms whose advantage is scope - everything included, no surprise invoices, one conversation a year instead of six - are described worst by a bare number, and regret publishing most.
Volume matters differently depending on where a practice sits in its own cycle. A firm at capacity loses very little by shedding the bottom of its enquiry pool; it was going to decline that work anyway, just more slowly.
A firm rebuilding after losing a large client is in the opposite position. It needs conversations, including the ones that go nowhere, because a share of them will surprise it. Publishing narrows the funnel precisely when the funnel is the asset.
Neither is the right answer. The pricing page is a capacity decision wearing marketing clothes, and it should be revisited when capacity changes. Firms get burnt by publishing in a busy year and leaving the page untouched through a quiet one.
The commoditisation worry is usually stated as we will become a commodity. That is not what happens. Compliance work does not become interchangeable because three firms published figures. What happens is narrower and more irritating: the page invites comparison on the single dimension it displays.
Put an annual figure beside a service name and you have built a comparison table for the reader whether you meant to or not. They will fill the other columns from whichever competitors also publish, and the columns nobody can fill - responsiveness, who does the work, whether anyone rings back in March - stay empty.
That is a page design problem, not a philosophical one.
The second objection is concrete, and I have watched it happen. A competitor reads your page, prices just under it, and stays quiet about what they left out. Their figure is not a lie. It is a smaller parcel described in the same words.
A price shown on a website has to be accurate and not misleading in the same way a quote letter does, and the rules on pricing claims under the Fair Trading Act draw no distinction between the two. That constrains outright deception. It does nothing to stop a genuinely narrower service being sold at a genuinely lower price while the reader assumes equivalence.
The defence is not secrecy. It is being clearer about what is in the parcel than the firm underneath you can be bothered being. Secrecy holds only until one competitor in your suburb publishes, and then you are the firm with something to hide.
Most firms that publish do not publish a price. They publish a floor or a band, and the two behave differently.
A starting-from figure filters hard at the bottom and nowhere else. It tells a reader whether they are in the room and nothing about where they will land, so the qualification benefit is real but partial - and the reframing cost is small, because nobody mistakes a floor for a quote.
A range does more work and carries more risk. Readers anchor to the bottom of any range they are shown, so a band running from a simple compliance job to a complex group structure gets read as the lower number. Keep any band narrow and tied to a described situation - this sort of client, this sort of year.
The arrangement that holds up best splits the page in two. Recurring compliance work - annual accounts, GST returns, a tax return on a straightforward structure - carries a figure. Advisory, restructures, due diligence, anything where scope is discovered rather than known, carries an enquiry.
It works because it matches how the reader is shopping. Someone comparing compliance providers wants a number and will keep clicking until they find one. Someone contemplating a restructure already knows the answer is it depends, and is not offended by being asked to make contact.
The risk is a second half that reads as evasive, and that is a writing problem rather than a pricing one. The enquiry-only services need as much detail about process, scope and what drives cost as the priced ones get about price.
There is a third option that gets overlooked, and it is where I would start with a hesitant firm. Publish how you price rather than what you charge.
- Fixed fee agreed in advance, or hourly
- Billed monthly, or annually in arrears
- What triggers a variation, and how it gets agreed
- Whether a phone call in July generates an invoice
- Whether the fee is reviewed each year, and against what
None of that is a number, and all of it answers what the anxious reader is really asking, which is not how much but will I be surprised. For a lot of practices it captures most of the trust benefit at none of the comparison cost, and it survives a rate change. A page of figures does not.
A pricing page reachable only from the footer is a page you have decided not to have. If the number is on the site it belongs in the main navigation - the readers it exists to filter are the ones hunting for it, and burying it sends them off to read somebody else's.
What sits beside the figure matters more than the figure. The pages that perform put three things next to it: what is included and what is not, who the typical client is, and what happens next. The third is routinely missing. A reader who has just decided they can afford you needs an immediate, low-commitment step - a fifteen-minute call, not a form promising a proposal in due course.
Advisers carrying disclosure obligations under the regime the Financial Markets Authority administers already publish fee information somewhere. Making the two pages agree is worth an hour of someone's time.
Most firms publish, feel uneasy for a quarter, and never find out whether it worked. The measurement is not difficult, and it is not about traffic.
Before changing anything, write down three numbers for the previous six months: enquiries received, engagements won, and a rough estimate of partner hours spent on enquiries that went nowhere. Six months later, write them down again. If enquiries fell, engagements held and wasted hours dropped, the page is doing its job. If engagements fell alongside the enquiries, the fix is usually the content around the number rather than the number itself.
Give it two quarters. Enquiry patterns in NZ practices are seasonal enough that a single quarter will tell you whatever you already wanted to hear.
Firms that agonise over this are usually asking whether publishing fees is right. It is a page, not a position. It can go up in March and come down in September, and the only thing that makes it permanent is treating it that way. The more useful question is what a reader arriving on your site today can work out about cost from what is already there - because for most practices the answer is nothing at all, and that is a decision too.
