Every accounting firm I’ve worked at, including my own, has billed projects on completion.

That makes sense if you bill by time. If you do not know how long the project took until it is done, how else would you know what to charge? That’s a discussion for another newsletter.

Even though I was not billing by time, I still collected payment after delivery for the first two years of running my firm. I used Ignition* to pull payment from the client’s account after I delivered the tax return.

Complete return. Press button. Get paid. Nice.

Not a bad workflow.

Side note: If you bill on completion and you don’t have the client’s payment information before you complete the project… You’re making it so unnecessarily hard on yourself for no reason, so stop doing that.

Getting paid on completion does have a perk: it motivates you to complete the project so you can get paid.

And that’s the only benefit I can think of.

I’d like to counter that benefit with the fact that I’ve never felt unmotivated to complete a project when I get paid upfront. That was a concern before I started billing upfront, but I’m still motivated to do great work, serve the client well, and move on to the next thing.

And this is coming from someone with undiagnosed ADHD.

After two years of billing on completion, I took a baby step.

I started charging a $150 deposit when clients signed an engagement with me. When the return was delivered, I would then bill the remaining amount. This got old fast because it added an extra admin step.

After no pushback on the deposit, I switched to 100% upfront payment for personal tax return prep. (Business accounting & taxes are still billed over the calendar year)

The main driver of the conversion was that I wanted to spend less admin time on billing… which, thanks to Ignition, was already not that much. But I’m that lazy.

The second reason was cash flow.

I had just hired a full time employee, and I liked the idea of bringing cash in at the beginning of the year instead of waiting until work was completed.… just in case.

At the time, I also started questioning why we don’t bill upfront as an industry. I think the simple answer, and it’s what I mentioned at the beginning of the newsletter… because of time based billing.

But even still… What makes more sense as a business practice: Get paid after you do the work, or get paid after? What business owner is going to say, “You know what, I like the risk of potentially not getting paid for work that I did.”

As a consumer, you can appreciate it because that means you know the work is finished before you pay someone. The downside is that the amount may not be what you were expecting.

But as a consumer, you can respect why businesses charge upfront for services. The business is about to spend time and money on a deliverable, and it’s the business's choice not to front the initial investment.

When I switched to collecting money upon proposal signing, one client pushed back, stating that they never pay anyone upfront, not even contractors (which is an even crazier business practice considering materials & labor). I let them pay on completion for that one time and told them that, going forward, it would be upfront.

And guess what? They are still working with me.

That experience made me realize that clients care way less about when they pay than we think they do. I thought it would cause mutiny, but there was basically zero pushback.

Not worrying about getting paid or not is a huge weight lifted as a business owner. I don’t have to chase clients down and break some fingers to teach them a lesson. Client motivation is at an all time high because they already paid you.

Would you like to know how I handle fixed fee billing and what I do when projects don’t go as planned, or something unexpected happens?

Stay tuned.

Thanks for reading.

Logan

4/30 - April 2026 New Member Orientation - Meet New Friends!

5/6 - Google My Business Working Session

5/21 - Monthly Booked & Balanced Bookkeeping Session with Erin Pohan

*Referral link where I’ll get paid if you end up using Ignition.