Bookkeeper & Accountant Practice Tracker Spreadsheet
This spreadsheet works out what each fixed monthly fee is really paying you per hour, and how far that rate has moved since the engagement letter was signed.
A fixed fee is a promise about the price, not a promise about the work. The fee stays where the engagement letter left it while the work grows quietly — a quick question, a late supplier, one more report nobody thought to charge for — until the best client on the list is the worst-paid hour in the week.
What is in it
- Six linked tabs, from Start Here through to a one-screen Overview.
- Setup — two figures, and one of them is a decision: what your hour is worth.
- Clients — 40 rows: fee, dates, months billed, hours logged and the effective rate that falls out of them.
- Time — 800 rows in quarter hours: the date, the client, what the work was and how long it took.
- Scope Creep — then and now, client by client: the first three months of an engagement set against the last three.
- Overview — the comfortable number and the real one, side by side.
Who it is for
Bookkeepers and accountants billing fixed monthly fees, and any other practice where a monthly price buys uncapped work: retainer designers, VAs, marketing consultants, IT support.
The worked example
The worked practice holds fourteen clients on fixed monthly fees, twenty-two months at the longest. $133,285.00 billed against 1,817.6 hours is an effective rate of $73.33 an hour, comfortably above the $65.00 the owner decided her hour was worth — and on that average, exactly one client of fourteen is below the line.
Measured at the two ends of each engagement instead, none of the fourteen were below $65 an hour in their first three months and seven are below it now, with the same work taking 44.3% more hours than it did at the start. The largest fee in the practice, $1,250 a month and unchanged since signing, went from 36.6 hours and $102.35 an hour to 71.2 hours and $52.68 — a fall of 48.5%.
How it works
Compatible with Microsoft Excel 2016 or newer on Windows or Mac, Google Sheets, and LibreOffice. No macros, no add-ons, no account to create, nothing to install.
The download has two workbooks: one with the example above already filled in, so you can see what every column expects, and the same file completely blank for your own figures. A plain-English guide comes as a PDF. Order on WhatsApp — $9
Orders are taken on WhatsApp: message me and I’ll send the payment details, then the files as soon as the payment is confirmed.
A look inside the file
Questions people actually ask
How do I work out what a fixed monthly fee actually pays me per hour?
You log time in quarter hours against each client and the file divides the fee by the hours, then compares the first three months of the engagement with the last three. In the worked practice, $133,285.00 billed over 1,817.6 hours is an effective rate of $73.33 against a $65.00 target — on the average, one client of fourteen is below the line; measured on the last three months, seven are. The biggest fee in the book, $1,250 a month, went from $102.35 an hour to $52.68, a 48.5% fall, without anybody renegotiating anything.
I am not a bookkeeper. Does it work for other fixed-fee work?
Yes — retainer designers, VAs, marketing consultants and IT support all behave the same way: anything billed monthly where the work is not capped. Hourly and project clients fit too; put the fee in as the monthly figure for the months it covers and the rate columns work the same. The file holds 40 clients and 800 time entries, a comfortable two years for a small practice.
Do I have to log every minute of my day?
No — quarter hours, recorded at the end of each job, is all it needs. Log the chasing, the emails and the phone calls, because those are the hours that grow; a file that only records the reconciliations will tell you everything is fine and it will be wrong. Being roughly honest about the small jobs is what makes the trend readable.
Will it run in Google Sheets, and is there anything to install?
It runs in Google Sheets through File then Import then Upload, and in Excel 2016 or newer on Windows and Mac and in LibreOffice. It is a .xlsx workbook with no macros and no add-ons, so there is nothing to install, no account to create and no subscription. You download the file and it is yours.
Is this time and billing software?
No — time and billing software exists to invoice hours, and you are not invoicing hours; this measures a fixed fee against the work it actually buys. It is not an invoicing tool and not practice management: there is no workflow, no deadline tracking and no job queue. It is connected to no ledger, bank feed or portal, and it is not tax, legal or accounting advice.
Need it built around your business?
This file assumes a fixed monthly fee, hours logged in quarter hours, and one target rate for the whole practice. If your work is priced differently — staff on several different cost rates rather than one owner’s hour, fees with a per-transaction or per-payslip element on top, or annual compliance fees you want spread across the months the work is really done — I can build the same arithmetic around your own engagement terms.
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