What a new client
is worth to a practice.

Search 'how much should an accounting firm spend on marketing' and you'll mostly find US figures. The most quoted comes from the Association for Accounting Marketing and Hinge. Its 2025-26 study of 87 firms found high-growth firms spent 2.1% of revenue on marketing and the rest 1%, excluding staff costs. Those 87 firms had combined revenue of more than $16 billion. They are not a four-person practice in Wyong.

One detail is worth keeping. The high-growth firms put 29.6% of their budget into conferences and in-person events, more than the slower firms did. Even at that size, relationships carry a lot of the marketing.

I couldn't find an Australian study of practice marketing spend that I'd trust. If someone quotes you an Australian percentage, ask for the source.

The QuickBooks Australia study, run by Agile Market Intelligence in May and June 2024 with 443 responses, mostly from firms of one to nine staff, gives the one Australian per-client figure I'd use. It's a vendor survey, so treat it as a check on your guesses, not a target.

What you can spend comes from margin, not fees. Syft, which makes practice reporting software, says a net profit margin of at least 25% is often targeted by accounting firms, and that the bottom quarter of Australian firms in its data struggled to stay profitable in mid-2024. If your margin is thin, a new client adds work faster than profit, and the right budget may be smaller than you'd like.

Use gross margin in the calculator: the fee left after the direct cost of doing the work, which is mostly staff time. That's the money a new client actually adds.

Put in your own numbers, by client type if you can. The fee starts at the QuickBooks median as a placeholder; the other starting numbers are made up.

Accounting is one of the few small business services where clients pay again every year without being sold to again. The same study found three in four firms bill quarterly, monthly or by project. A bookkeeping client on monthly fees in Charlestown can be worth far more over five years than their first invoice suggests.

That cuts both ways. Spending a year's gross profit to win a client who stays six years can be a good deal. Spending it on a tax-time one-off who goes back to doing it themselves next year isn't. Know which kind your ads bring in, and use the Google Ads page to filter out searches from people doing their own return.

The calculator gives the most you could spend, not what you should. Most practices run out of staff hours before they run out of money. If the team is full until March, more spend now just builds a waiting list, and people on waiting lists go elsewhere. The tax time page has a capacity planner.

When you do raise spend, do it in steps and watch cost per new client who stays, not cost per click. Every channel reaches a point where the next dollar brings back less. Finding that point is what my Spend Curve method is for.