London has no shortage of businesses that need an accountant. New limited companies are set up here all the time, contractors move from employment to their own company, landlords discover that rental income comes with a tax return, and growing startups outgrow the bookkeeper who set them up. For a small or mid-sized practice in Croydon, Islington or the City fringe, the clients exist. The real questions are whether they find you, and whether paying to be found is worth it.
When a partner considers investing in visibility, the conversation quickly turns to one figure: how many new clients would it take to pay this back? This guide does not give you a magic number. It gives you a way to reason it through with your own figures, so the decision rests on your practice and not on a sales pitch.
Why accountancy is well suited to this calculation
Your business has a feature most sectors would envy: recurring fees. A company that hands you its annual accounts, corporation tax return, VAT returns and payroll does not pay once. It pays every year, often monthly, and it tends to stay, because switching accountants is a chore owners avoid unless something goes wrong.
That changes the maths completely. A client won this year keeps contributing next year and the year after, with no new acquisition cost. A visibility investment that brings in a handful of extra clients is not just recovered over twelve months: it builds the value of your fee book.
The three numbers you need
Before you look at any price, gather three figures you know better than anyone.
- The annual value of a client. Add up a typical client's fees over a year (compliance, advisory, payroll, Making Tax Digital support) and keep the margin after staff time, not the gross fee.
- Your conversion rate. Out of ten businesses that contact you seriously for a quote, how many sign an engagement letter?
- Your capacity. How many new clients can your team onboard each month without missing a filing deadline or rushing a year-end?
Capacity is the one partners forget. A practice that receives more enquiries than it can handle gets to choose its clients, which is a good problem, as long as you plan your hiring around it, especially before January.
Running the numbers
Take the Momentum plan as an example. The setup is £1,300 and the plan costs £1,600 a month, so the first year comes to £20,500. With Presence (£940 a month), the first year is £12,580. Those are the only fixed figures in the calculation.
The rest is yours. Divide the first-year investment by the annual margin of a typical client and you have the number of clients needed to break even within year one. For most practices with recurring compliance work, that number is modest, and it does not need to be reached in a month: it needs to be reached across the year. Then remember what the simple division leaves out: every client won keeps paying in year two and beyond. Over three years, the same handful of clients repays the investment several times.
The payback calculator at the top of the Traffic Engine page does this for you. Enter your client value and choose a plan, and it shows the expected ramp-up over the first three months and the month in which the investment is recovered.
What moves the break-even point
The ramp-up period
The first months are a build phase and enquiries arrive gradually. Judge the investment over the year and beyond, not on the first quarter. That is why the commitment runs for 12 months with a measured review at three months.
The type of enquiry
A practice that attracts limited companies with ongoing needs breaks even faster than one that mostly attracts one-off self-assessment returns in January. Useful visibility puts you in front of the owner looking for an accountant for the long term.
The cost of doing nothing
The other side of the calculation is what you lose by staying invisible. Each new company that picks another firm because it found them first is a recurring client lost for years. We look at that missed revenue in the cost of being invisible for an accounting firm. For the general reasoning that applies to any business, see payback on a visibility investment.
Where Traffic Engine fits
Traffic Engine is Kolonell's service for making your practice visible when business owners search for an accountant in London, on Google and in AI assistant answers, so that you receive qualified enquiries. Kolonell ran it on its own website first; the Search Console curves are published on the offer page.
It starts with a Visibility Audit at £590, delivered within 48 business hours and deducted from the setup if you start within 30 days. You follow results in your own Search Console and receive a dated report every week. What your plan includes goes live on schedule, or the following month is free. Each sector is capped at 3 seats per area, and exclusivity is available only while no other practice in your area has signed. See the offer and run the numbers for your practice.
Your next step
Spend ten minutes on your three numbers: annual client value, conversion rate, capacity. Put them into the payback calculator. If the break-even point looks achievable, the next question is who to trust with the work, and our guide to choosing a visibility partner for an accounting firm covers the questions to ask.