The short answer: a good accounting service package is not a tier name copied off someone else’s website. It’s a fenced bundle of real services, priced above your floor, built for one specific kind of client.

Search this exact phrase today and you’ll find two kinds of results.

Software companies showing you their own product tiers. And accounting blogs showing you a bronze, silver, gold ladder with every dollar figure quietly scrubbed out.

Neither one is buildable. A software price list isn’t your price list. A tier ladder with no numbers is a shape, not a plan.

This article is the plan.

Five real package structures, five different client types, every one with an actual price range and the reasoning behind it.

One thing before we start.

Dream Firms sells no pricing software and takes no vendor money. What follows is what has actually worked for entrepreneurial accountants building these exact packages, not a vendor’s rate card wearing an accountant’s name.

For the floor formula every price below is built on, and for the general three-tier ladder that fits a typical small-business client, the companion piece is how to price accounting services for maximum profit. That article goes deep on one structure. This one goes wide: five different client types, each with its own package.

Why Generic Menus Undersell You

Here is the pattern in almost every “package examples” guide you’ll find.

Basic. Standard. Premium. Bronze. Silver. Gold. Three boxes, climbing in height, each one holding “more” of something vague.

It looks like structure. It behaves like a shrug.

The problem isn’t the three-tier idea itself. Tiering client offers is genuinely useful, and if you want the full treatment of that structure, the tiered-pricing playbook covers it end to end.

The problem is treating one ladder as universal.

A three-tier menu built for a small retail client does not fit a real estate investor running twelve doors through four LLCs. It does not fit a contractor tracking job costs across nine open jobs. It does not fit an advisory-only client who already has a bookkeeper and needs something else entirely.

Force all four into the same bronze-silver-gold shape and you get one of two outcomes. You underprice the complex clients, because the “gold” tier was sized for someone simpler. Or you overprice the simple ones, because “gold” became the only tier with real margin in it.

Neither outcome is an accident. It’s what happens when the package is designed around a template instead of a client.

Picture what that looks like in a real proposal. A real estate investor with nine doors gets handed the same $950-a-month “Growth” tier built for a typical small retail client. The investor’s actual delivery hours, split across three entities and nine sets of property records, run closer to double what that fee assumed. Nobody was dishonest. The firm just never built a second ladder.

The fix starts with a question nobody asks first: what does this specific client actually need done, and how should it be reported back to them?

Answer that honestly for five common client types, price each answer from your floor, and you get five packages that look nothing alike, because the clients don’t look anything alike either.

That’s the rest of this article. But first, the builder those five packages are all made from.

The Dream Firms Package Builder: Five Modules

Every package below, no matter how different the client, is assembled from the same five modules.

Think of them as the five questions a package has to answer before it’s ready to quote.

Module 1: Core Compliance

The non-negotiable base. Bookkeeping and reconciliations for most clients. Tax preparation and filing for others. Job costing for a contractor. This is the work that happens no matter which tier the client picks, because it’s the reason they hired you in the first place.

Module 2: Reporting Layer

How often, and how deep. Monthly financials or quarterly. A single consolidated statement or a breakdown by property, location, or job. This module is where niche clients diverge hardest from a generic small-business package, because the reporting they need to run their business looks nothing like a standard income statement.

Module 3: Advisory Layer

Planning calls, forecasts, banker support, KPI review. This is the layer that turns a compliance vendor into a trusted advisor, and it’s the layer most firms give away for free instead of pricing on purpose.

Module 4: Support Level

Response time and access. A 48-hour email queue is a different product than a same-day answer and a direct line. Both are legitimate. Only one of them should carry the higher fee.

Module 5: Software & Access

Which tools are bundled into the fee, and which are billed separately. A client portal, a real-time dashboard, a shared drive. Decide this once, in writing, so it’s never negotiated client by client.

Five modules. One option chosen in each, for one specific client type. That’s a package.

The five below are built exactly that way. Further down, a sixth gets assembled from scratch, live, so you can see the builder in motion before you try it on your own book.

One practical note before the five examples. A firm just starting to package its services shouldn’t try to build all five at once.

Pick the one or two client types that already make up most of your book, or the niche you’re deliberately moving toward, and build those packages first. The builder works the same way for client type six, seven, and twenty. There’s no reason to build them before you have the clients to use them on.

The Five Packages at a Glance

Before the deep dive into each one, here’s how the five compare side by side.

Notice how little they share beyond the five-module skeleton. That’s the point: a package built for the client in front of you looks different from a package built for a different client, every time.

Illustrative ranges summarized from the detailed breakdowns below. Every range assumes pricing starts from your own floor, not a competitor’s number.

Three of the five scale on a variable that has nothing to do with revenue: location count, door count, and job count. That’s the tell that a generic revenue-based fee schedule misses real complexity in this profession far more often than it should.

What the Market Actually Pays

Before five specific packages, a word on where the general market sits, because context matters even when the goal is a niche-specific price.

Two disclosures first. Every figure below is attributed to a named source. And these are general-service benchmarks, not niche-package prices; nobody publishes a national survey of what real estate investors pay for per-property bookkeeping, which is exactly the gap the five packages below are built to fill.

Sources: Ignition, U.S. Accounting and Tax Pricing Benchmark · National Society of Accountants, Income and Fees survey

Notice what that table doesn’t tell you.

It doesn’t tell you what to charge a real estate investor with eleven doors across four entities. It doesn’t tell you what a contractor’s job-costing package should cost, or what an advisory-only retainer looks like once the client already has their own bookkeeper.

Nobody publishes those numbers, because they depend entirely on the client type. That’s not a gap in the research. It’s the reason a single national average was never going to be useful for a niche package in the first place.

The five packages below fill that gap the same way the table above was built: from real work, with the reasoning shown.

There’s a second reason the general table understates niche work. A national average blends a simple single-entity client with a complex multi-property one into a single number, and the complexity is exactly what the average erases.

Ask any two accountants what “monthly bookkeeping” costs and one will be thinking about a single-location service business while the other is thinking about a nine-door rental portfolio. The number that’s right for one is never right for the other, which is the entire argument for pricing the client type rather than the service label.

Package One: The Startup Compliance Package

Who it’s for: a solo founder or two-person team, under roughly $250,000 in revenue, a single simple entity, and low transaction volume. Think a service business in its first two years, or a small e-commerce seller who just needs the books closed and the return filed correctly.

This client doesn’t need quarterly planning calls or a KPI dashboard. They need the compliance work done right, on time, without becoming a second job for them.

Overbuild this package with advisory add-ons and you’ll price yourself out of a client type that, done right, is fast to deliver and easy to keep for years.

This package is deliberately built to be outgrown. The goal isn’t to keep a startup client here forever; it’s to serve them honestly while they’re small, then move them into whichever of the next four packages fits the business they grow into.

Illustrative price range: $350 to $650 a month.

Where a specific client lands in that range depends on transaction volume and how many follow-up questions they realistically generate, the same floor-formula inputs from the companion pricing article.

Illustrative pricing from Dream Firms’ work with entrepreneurial accountants building this exact package. Build yours from your own floor math.

One caution: the published market band for bookkeeping ($250 to $499 a month, per the table above) sits right at the bottom of this range. That’s not a coincidence. It tells you a meaningful share of the profession is pricing this exact client type at or below its true floor.

Package Two: The Multi-Location Retail & Restaurant Package

Who it’s for: a retail or restaurant operator running two or more locations, with point-of-sale data, inventory that actually moves, and hourly staff on payroll.

This client’s reporting problem is different in kind, not just in size, from a single-location business. They need to know which location is profitable and which one is quietly draining the other two, and a single consolidated P&L hides exactly that.

Because delivery hours scale with location count, this package is priced in bands rather than one flat number.

Illustrative pricing from Dream Firms’ work with entrepreneurial accountants serving multi-location clients. Build yours from your own floor math.

The multi-location package also does not fit neatly into the general three-tier ladder in the tiered-pricing playbook. Location count, not a good-better-best menu, is the variable that should move the fee here.

Multi-location clients also tend to be the first to ask for a dedicated point of contact rather than a shared inbox. Building that into the Support Level module up front, rather than granting it ad hoc to whichever location manager asks loudest, keeps the package fair across all of a client’s locations.

Package Three: The Real Estate Investor Package

Who it’s for: an investor holding rental property through one or more LLCs, ranging from a handful of doors in a single entity to a larger portfolio spread across multiple holding companies.

This client’s real product isn’t a profit and loss statement. It’s clarity on which property is actually making money, clean entity-level books for lending and refinancing, and K-1s that arrive without a scramble every March.

Illustrative pricing from Dream Firms’ work with entrepreneurial accountants serving real estate investor clients. Build yours from your own floor math.

The failure mode here is quiet rather than dramatic. Nobody gets fired for underpricing a growing rental portfolio. The firm simply works harder every year for the same fee, while the client’s portfolio, and the delivery hours it demands, keeps expanding underneath the old number.

Niche depth is what makes this package defensible at these prices. If real estate isn’t a niche you’ve deliberately chosen yet, the best niches for accounting firms is the place to start that decision.

Package Four: The Contractor Job-Costing Package

Who it’s for: a general contractor or specialty trade running several jobs at once, where the real question isn’t “did we make money this month” but “which job made money, and which one is quietly bleeding it away.”

Generic bookkeeping software shows revenue and expenses. It doesn’t show job costing, retainage, or a work-in-progress schedule that tells a surety underwriter the business is bondable. That’s the entire value of this package, and it’s why it can’t be priced like a standard small-business bundle.

Illustrative pricing from Dream Firms’ work with entrepreneurial accountants serving contractor and trades clients. Build yours from your own floor math.

Every unbilled change order and every retainage dollar nobody tracked is invisible margin leaking out of a job that already has a package price attached to it. The reporting layer above exists specifically to stop that leak, which is also the argument for why this package earns a premium over generic bookkeeping.

Ask a contractor what a bonding company or a bank actually wants to see, and the answer is never “a profit and loss statement.” It’s a WIP schedule that reconciles to the balance sheet, the exact deliverable most bookkeeping subscriptions were never built to produce. That gap alone justifies pricing this package well above a standard small-business bundle.

Contractors who are actively bidding larger jobs often need this package specifically to keep their bonding capacity intact. A bonding company that sees clean, current WIP schedules extends more capacity than one that sees stale numbers, which means this package can directly expand how much work a contractor is even eligible to bid.

Package Five: The Advisory-Only CFO Package

Who it’s for: a business already generating $1 million to $10 million in revenue, with its own internal bookkeeper or controller handling day-to-day entries, that needs strategic oversight instead of more data entry.

This is the package most firms never build, because it requires believing your judgment is worth more than your typing speed. The published data says it is: fractional CFO work commands the highest fees on the entire pricing menu, and this package is where that value gets captured on purpose instead of given away inside a bookkeeping bundle.

Illustrative price range: $2,500 to $8,000+ a month, depending on meeting cadence, the number of entities reported on, and whether lender relationships are part of the scope.

Illustrative pricing from Dream Firms’ work with entrepreneurial accountants offering advisory-only retainers. Build yours from your own floor math.

Notice what isn’t in this package: any line item billed by the hour.

Judgment is the fastest thing an experienced accountant delivers and the most valuable thing a client buys. Billing it hourly prices your best work as if it were the cheapest.

The deep structuring of retainer tiers, deliverables, and how to anchor the fee to a client’s own numbers lives in the full fractional CFO pricing guide. This package is the concrete example; that article is the method.

When a Client Outgrows Their Package

None of the five packages above are meant to hold a client forever.

A startup compliance client who crosses $250,000 in revenue and hires their first employee has outgrown Package One, whether or not they’ve said so.

A real estate investor who closes on door number twelve has quietly crossed into the top tier of Package Three, and the fee that felt right at four doors is now a discount they didn’t ask for and you didn’t intend to give.

Watching for that shift is not optional maintenance. It’s where a meaningful share of a growing firm’s margin actually lives.

Handle the conversation the same way a repricing conversation gets handled anywhere else in the firm: lead with what they’re gaining, name the new number, give a real effective date.

When to raise prices at your accounting firm covers the full set of trigger events and the script for that exact call, and it applies just as directly to moving a client up a package tier as it does to a straight fee increase.

The alternative, leaving a grown client on a package priced for who they used to be, is the single most common way a well-built package quietly turns into next year’s underpriced client.

Build Your Own Package: A Live Walkthrough

Here’s the builder in motion, on a client type none of the five above cover exactly: a solo e-commerce seller doing roughly $600,000 a year on Amazon and Shopify, with inventory, sales tax in a dozen states, and no employees yet.

Not quite the startup package. Too much sales-tax complexity for that. Not a multi-location retail business either, since there’s no physical location at all.

Walk it through the five modules.

Cost it out. Multi-state sales tax filing and two-channel reconciliation run this client to roughly 6 to 8 delivery hours a month, well above the startup package’s 2 to 3. At the same $140 illustrative cost per hour, that’s a breakeven of $840 to $1,120, before margin.

What if the client hesitates at $1,200? Don’t strip modules to hit a lower number; that erodes the fence before the relationship even starts.

Instead, walk back to which module is driving their hesitation. Often it’s the seasonal support tier, not the core compliance work, and dropping to standard year-round support instead of peak-season upgrades can bring the number down without touching the work that actually protects your margin.

That’s the builder. Five questions, answered honestly for the client in front of you, priced from your floor, named for the outcome.

It works on a client type this article never mentions by name, which is the entire point. The five packages above are examples of the method, not a closed list of the only clients it works for.

Presenting a Package Without Flinching

A well-built niche package still has to survive the moment you say the price out loud.

The general mechanics of that moment, diagnose, prescribe one number, then stop talking, are covered in full in how to price accounting services. Niche packages need one addition to that script: proof the package was built for them specifically, not pulled off a shelf.

These three rules work because they answer the objection a niche client is actually thinking, even when they don’t say it out loud: does this person understand my business, or am I about to get a generic bookkeeper’s price list with my industry’s name typed on top?

One more presentation rule specific to niche work: never apologize for the premium.

A contractor who has watched a job lose money without knowing why until the final invoice does not need convincing that job costing has value. They need the number said plainly, and the silence that follows it.

When a prospect is already an underpriced hourly client of yours, moving them into one of these packages is a repricing conversation as much as a packaging one. How to raise prices without losing clients covers the letter and the sequencing for that exact move. And once the pipeline is filling with the right client type, how to sell accounting services carries the close the rest of the way.

Mistakes That Sink a Package Before It Ships

Every one of these is reversible. Most firms make two or three of them without noticing.

• 1

  One ladder for every client type.

  The bronze-silver-gold menu built for a small retail client gets handed to a real estate investor, and neither the investor nor the fee makes any sense.

• 2

  No stated fence around the package.

  “A few extra properties” or “one more job site” quietly doubles delivery hours at a fixed fee. State the fence in writing, and quote anything outside it before starting the work.

• 3

  Giving away the advisory layer for free.

  Bundling CFO-level judgment into a compliance package because “it doesn’t take that long” prices your most valuable work at zero.

• 4

  Never repricing the package annually.

  A package built correctly two years ago is quietly underpriced today. When to raise prices at your accounting firm covers the trigger events worth watching for.

• 5

  Packaging around your convenience, not the client’s outcome.

  A reporting cadence that’s easy for you to produce isn’t the same as one the client actually needs to run their business.

• 6

  Discounting the top tier to close a deal.

  Every discount without a trade trains the market that the advisory tier is negotiable, which erodes it for every client after this one.

• 7

  Building a niche package for a client who was never going to fit it.

  Some prospects don’t fit any package on your list, and forcing one rather than releasing the client is its own slow-motion mistake. How to fire bad accounting clients covers that decision honestly.

• 8

  Building the package around what’s easy to sell, not what the client needs.

  A software-bundled package looks impressive in a proposal. If half the tools go unused, the client is paying for a demo, not a service, and they’ll notice within two renewal cycles.

Fix the fence first, then the advisory layer, then the annual repricing ritual. In that order, the rest gets easier to catch.

None of these eight mistakes are exotic. Every one of them is a firm that built a good package and then let a small shortcut erode it, one client at a time. Catch them early and the package keeps doing exactly what it was built to do: turn a fair price into a predictable one, for you and for the client.

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