How Many Clients Should I Have to Earn Six Figures? — FinePoints Bookkeeping (2024)

How many clients do I need? This is a commonly asked question I get from bookkeepers just starting out.

The answer is that it depends.

It varies based on how much you work, what services you offer as a bookkeeper, where you live, and especially, the types of bookkeeping clients you take on. It also depends on the size of your clients. Today I’m going to teach you step-by-step how to reach your annual financial goal.

Watch the video here, or keep reading!

How Do I Figure Out How Many Clients I Need?

The short answer is that you will need to service between 15-20 clients each month in order to earn a $100k yearly salary. This varies based on how big the client is and how much you charge each month.

To help you picture different scenarios, I created a client calculator spreadsheet that you can download below. You can input your annual financial goal for your bookkeeping business, then, fill in different types of clients to see how that affects your income.

The spreadsheet is set up for both fixed pricing as well as for bookkeepers who charge an hourly rate. One key is deciding how much to charge each client and then figuring out the mix of small, medium, and large clients you’ll need. Obviously, you’d probably need just a few large clients to bring in the same income as 10 small clients.

RELATED: 10 Tips to Get More Clients as a Freelance Bookkeeper

How to Use the Spreadsheet

On the top of the spreadsheet is a place to insert your annual income goals, and it will break it down into your suggested monthly revenue. You can adjust the yearly amount based on your preference, but, for this example, I’ve chosen to use $100k as a yearly gross income.

From there, we will move into experimenting by inserting different types of clients into the calculator. I may have some larger clients who pay me $1,000 a month, some medium clients who pay me $500 a month, and some small clients who pay me $250 a month.

RELATED: How to Price Bookkeeping Services for Small, Medium, and Large Clients

A small client, in example, may just have one or two bank accounts that you reconcile without too many transactions each month.

You can insert your rates into the spreadsheet and begin to play around with how many of each sized client you would need to hit your income goals.

Say you have two larger clients each paying you $1,000 a month. Your majority of clients, maybe 10 or so, may come from your medium-sized base paying you $500 a month, and a few additional clients may be in the small category. This will put us around that $100k a year revenue goal.

So, as you can see, it’s fun to just play around with the numbers and see what you need in order to hit your income goal. Maybe you prefer less clients a month, so you will need to work with more large clients.

RELATED: How to Start a Bookkeeping Business

How Does the Spreadsheet Work for Hourly Rates?

As I was calculating the different scenarios and seeing how many clients I would need to work with, I saw one of the outcomes was 16 clients. I wonder if that would be too many clients a month and if I’d be working 100 hour weeks that I didn’t want to be working.

Because of this, I created an hourly portion on the spreadsheet so we could track how many hours on average you would be working with each size of client.

Try to think about it in terms of how many hours you would be working with each sized client per month. On average, maybe a small client would take five hours a month, a medium client would be 10 hours a month, and a large client would take 20 hours per month.

From there, you can multiply those hours by the number of clients you would need in each category to satisfy your income goals. The “monthly hours all clients” category is the amount of hours you are working per month in each category of clients, and the green box is your total number of hours you bill each week.

This is a great way to gauge if you’re charging enough per hour for the bookkeeping work you are doing.

Can Other Service Providers Use This Spreadsheet?

The good news is that the client calculator spreadsheet isn’t singled out to just bookkeepers. Any service-providing business owner could use this calculator as a tool to track how many clients they need in order to make the income they desire.

Attorneys, coaches, web designers, wedding planners, and many other service professionals can benefit from this calculator with some minor tweaks. It’s a great way to gauge where you are at and where you want to get to.

What is your annual income goal as a bookkeeper? How many clients are you willing to work with each month?

Do you want monthly tips to grow your bookkeeping business?

Join the FinePoints Newsletter