There's no published cost-to-win or client value for an accounting firm — so the model builds the firm's own four numbers

Ask what it costs an accounting firm to win a client and there is no answer in the literature. The published cost-per-lead tables carry no accounting line; the nearest is business services at $93.69, which pools consultancies, agencies and back-office providers. The nearest acquisition-cost figure is business consulting at $533, from a different publisher using a different method. Neither is an accounting benchmark and neither should be presented as one. Client lifetime value is worse: the number most often quoted in the profession is the 76.9% of revenue that firms transact at, which is a practice valuation multiple and has nothing to do with what a client is worth over their life with the firm. Used that way it is wrong by an unknown amount in an unknown direction.

The figure most often quoted as an accounting firm's client value is 76.9% of revenue. That is what a practice sells for. It is not what a client is worth.

1. 01

   The absence of a benchmark is not a reason to skip the measurement

   A firm that cannot compare itself to the profession can still compare itself to itself. Cost per enquiry, cost per proposal, proposal win rate and first-year fee by service line are all available inside the firm's own systems within one quarter, and they answer the actual question better than a category average ever would.

2. 02

   Proxies are useful for sizing and useless for deciding

   Business services at $93.69 per lead is worth knowing as an order of magnitude when a firm is deciding whether paid search is plausible at all. It is worth nothing when deciding whether this firm's cost per enquiry is good or bad, because the categories are not the same and the sample contains no accounting firms.

3. 03

   A practice valuation multiple is a different object from client value

   76.9% of revenue is what a buyer pays for a book of clients including the systems, staff and goodwill attached. Client lifetime value is recurring fee times expected years times gross margin. They are related the way a house price is related to a month's rent, and swapping one for the other is the most common measurement error in the profession.

4. 04

   The economics are diverging by firm size, so a profession-wide figure would mislead even if it existed

   Income per partner rose 3.2% overall to $615,000, but firms at $2M to $5M in revenue lifted it 25% while firms at $10M to $20M fell 7.2%. Revenue growth slowed from 10.7% to 7.9%. Staff turnover improved from 19% to 11%, which changes the cost of capacity. A single benchmark drawn across that spread would describe almost nobody.

No credible published CPL / CAC / LTV exists for public accounting; adjacent-category figures are labelled proxies, not benchmarks.

The model builds four numbers the firm does not currently have and can obtain within a quarter. Every enquiry is registered at the point of contact with its source, service line and the person who received it, so cost per enquiry becomes calculable per channel. Every proposal is recorded with its fee, its service line and its outcome, so win rate and cost per won client follow. First-year fee and observed client tenure by service line are taken from practice management rather than estimated, and multiplied to a derived client value labelled as a derivation everywhere it appears. Published proxies are shown alongside for scale, marked as proxies from adjacent categories. From quarter two the firm's own figures replace them and the proxies are removed from the report entirely.

1. 1

   Weeks 1–3

   Enquiry register

   Every enquiry recorded at contact with source, service line and owner

   Owner: OmniFlow + firm ops

2. 2

   Weeks 3–6

   Proposal record

   Fee, service line and outcome captured on every proposal issued

   Owner: OmniFlow + partners

3. 3

   Weeks 4–8

   Retention and fee data

   First-year fee and observed client tenure by service line, from practice management

   Owner: Firm + OmniFlow

4. 4

   Weeks 8–10

   Derived client value

   A derivation from the firm's own inputs, labelled as one, reviewed by a partner

   Owner: OmniFlow

5. 5

   Quarterly

   Reporting

   Cost per enquiry, cost per won client and derived client value by service line

   Owner: OmniFlow

6. 6

   Quarter 2

   Drop the proxies

   Adjacent-category figures removed once the firm's own numbers exist

   Owner: OmniFlow

The model's output is four numbers with the firm's name on them: cost per enquiry by channel, cost per won client by service line, first-year fee, and a derived client value carrying an explicit label saying it is derived. Published proxies appear once, at the start, marked as coming from adjacent categories, and are removed as soon as they have been replaced. Nothing in this engagement should be reported against a profession-wide accounting benchmark, because no credible one exists, and the practice valuation multiple is never used as a stand-in for client value.

Modelled. Inputs: WordStream by LocaliQ, Google Ads Benchmarks 2026 (13,474 US search campaigns, April 2025 – March 2026); First Page Sage, Average CAC by Industry (updated January 2026); The Rosenberg Survey, 2025 MAP Survey. Modelled outputs are not a forecast or a guarantee of results. Cited: Absence confirmed against WordStream 2026 industry set (no accounting-specific funnel benchmark).

Every figure below is published research, not a client result. They are the inputs to the arithmetic above, listed so it can be checked rather than taken on trust. The bracketed number points to the full citation at the end of this page.

These are the surfaces this engagement is run and measured from, shown with representative figures built around the benchmarks cited on this page. Every account we run reports into views like these, and you keep ownership of all of them.

Each figure on this page, the system it is read from, and the definition and window it is measured over.

Not applicable — this is a modelled engagement. Its weakest input is that it has no external benchmark to test itself against, which is also the reason it exists. A firm that builds these four numbers will know whether it is improving and will not know whether it is competitive. The honest version says so at the start rather than dressing an adjacent-category proxy up as an accounting figure to fill the gap.

A modelled capability, not a client account. Figures illustrate what the model produces and are labelled as modelled wherever they appear. See all our work

Full citations for everything cited on this page, with the sample and period each study covers, so you can go and read the original.