Hi, I'm Damon Millar. I run an accountancy practice and work as a fractional CFO and business advisor to UK owner-managed businesses, which means I've spent the last few years building a firm that sells advice rather than filings.

Xero published its Modern Practice Playbook this month: 520 UK accountants and bookkeepers surveyed on AI, advisory, and pricing. I read the whole thing, then went back through it a second time with a calculator, because a stat on its own doesn't tell you what to do differently. This is that second pass, written up.

Five things are in here: what the headline numbers mean for your pricing, the arithmetic behind the hours-saved stat run against your own team, what the top quarter of firms do differently, a scored version of the timesheet check to run across your whole client list, and where the freed-up hours actually go.

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What's Inside

1. What the numbers mean for your pricing. Five stats from the survey, and the pricing decision each one is actually telling you to make.
2. The arithmetic behind the hours-saved stat. How Xero calculated 7.1 hours a week, and how to run the same calculation on your own team with your own numbers.
3. What the top quarter of firms do differently. The report calls them "top performers." Not a vibe, a defined group, compared line by line against the UK average.
4. The timesheet check, turned into a scored audit. The five-minute version from the post, built out into something you can run across your whole client list.
5. Where the freed-up hours actually go. How the firms that get this right build advisory into the practice, with a named case study.

Part 1: What the Numbers Actually Mean for Your Pricing

The report has dozens of statistics. Most of them are interesting. Five of them change what you should charge.

1. 73% of UK practices now bill on non-hourly terms

Fixed instalment fees (33%), fixed fee per piece of work (26%), and value-based pricing (14%) between them cover nearly three-quarters of client engagements. Hourly billing is down to 27%.

What this means for your pricing. If you're still on hourly billing, every hour AI saves you is an hour of revenue you've just given away. That's not a hypothetical. It's the direct mechanical effect of charging for time on a job that now takes less time. Moving even your most AI-assisted service lines to fixed or value-based pricing is what lets you keep the gain instead of handing it to the client for free.

2. Advisory carries the highest margin of any service, at 50.6%

Bookkeeping runs 49.2%, tax services 47.9%, financial reporting 46.3%. Advisory sits clearly above all three, and the firms already offering it rank it their single most profitable service line.