At the point when Lucy Cohen, business executive at accountancy practice, Mazuma, set up another restricted organization records and assessment or tax forms administration for small organizations, she chose to charge for it by the thickness of the printed material.

Who might have thought, even a couple of years back, that an accountant would be offering her administrations in the same way a green grocer offers bananas? Up to 1kg of research material expenses, a Mazuma customer is charged £199, as much as the 10kg tips the scales at £999. Cohen trusts that her approach is interesting.

There are siren voices that recommend changing for bookkeeping administrations by time – conventional hourly charging – has had its day. Accountants, these voices murmur, ought to evaluate the worth the customer puts on the administration they get and charge likewise. The esteemed cleric of “worth evaluating” is a Californian bookkeeper turned think-tank guru and a radio anchor called Ronald Baker. His main goal, he says, is to “cover the billable hour and timesheet” unequivocally.

Cook, who established the VeraSage Institute, says: “Accountants’’ plan of action is generally defective in light of the fact that the world has transformed.” He contends that accountancy customers don’t purchase time – they purchase “results”. So accountants need to re-design their plan of action, including the way they cost.

He says: “Accountants are information laborers and you can’t gauge the estimation of learning work when it takes. Time is the wrong measuring pole. It’s similar to thrusting a ruler into the stove to decide its temperature.”

The way to comprehend the idea of worth estimating is that the estimation of a bookkeeping administration is dictated by the customer who gets it. To take a straightforward sample, an organization whose tax issues are in apple-pie order, may put a lower esteem on expense counsel than an organization whose duty undertakings are tangled and discovers that it has HMRC overseers hunkering down upon it.

Cook’s contention is that if accountants comprehend the quality the customer puts on conveying the fancied result, they can value their support of mirroring that. He figures that somewhere around 5% and 7% of bookkeeping practices in the English-talking world have embraced a portion of the standards of worth evaluating as portrayed in his books on the subject, the most recent of which is Implementing Value Pricing.