Hysons Chartered Accountants turns a monthly loss on software recharges into around £1,250 profit

Hysons Chartered Accountants had a problem it knew about and kept putting off. Recharging client software should have paid for itself, but done by hand through fixed-fee Practice Ignition proposals, it quietly lost money instead, around £500 to £750 a month, as new clients went unbilled and price rises waited until a client's annual renewal. Every gap came out of the firm's margin.

After moving to Rechargly, new clients are captured from the start, price rises apply automatically, and recharges now turn a profit of around £1,250 a month.

At-a-glance stats

• Firm size: around 16 staff, 120 to 150 clients recharged across Xero, Dext, QuickBooks, payroll and confirmation fees
• Location: Andover, United Kingdom
• Key outcome: software recharges turned from a monthly loss into a monthly profit
• Efficiency gain: around 3 hours of admin saved a month

Before: What life looked like pre-change

Context

Hysons Chartered Accountants is an accountancy practice in Andover, Hampshire, serving mainly local small businesses, contractors, shops and sole director companies, plus a few larger audit clients. It recharges software to between 120 and 150 clients, around 90% of it Xero, alongside Dext, QuickBooks, outsourced payroll and its own confirmation statement fees.

Old workflow

Everything ran through Practice Ignition. Clients were set up on a fixed-fee proposal meant to cover their software for twelve months, and Guy Worthington, the firm's accounts manager, shared the billing with the practice manager. None of it was automatic, so it all depended on someone remembering.

Where the process broke down

New clients were where it fell down. Someone would join, pick up a Xero subscription partway through, and unless it was flagged the charge sat unbilled, sometimes for six months. A mid-year Xero price rise, meanwhile, could not reach a client until their proposal renewed a year later. Tracking it month by month felt too time-consuming, so the firm reviewed everything once a year and absorbed whatever had slipped through.

The partner discount did not save it. Hysons earns a Xero partner discount of around 25%, but that came nowhere near covering the leakage, and the firm was losing money on the subscriptions. A fixed twelve-month fee caused friction too, because mid-year increases were met with pushback.

The trigger

What finally pushed Hysons to act was simple: it was losing money on a process that should have run itself.

"The frustrating bit was losing money on something that we shouldn't be losing money on. It should just be self-sufficient in itself." — Guy Worthington, Accounts Manager, Hysons Chartered Accountants

Rechargly could import costs into XPM, which meant the firm could recharge more than just Xero, taking in Dext, QuickBooks, payroll and its confirmation fees, and finally be confident it was recovering its costs.

During: How the firm made the change

Implementation

Setup turned out lighter than Guy expected. Alex handled most of it, taking the firm's latest Xero bill and setting when invoices should go out, while Hysons only had to connect Stripe and Xero. The direct debit mandates were straightforward too: most already existed in Practice Ignition and transferred across rather than being re-signed, with new forms needed only for clients who were not already set up.

The new playbook

Instead of an annual pricing review reconciled by hand, recharging now runs automatically, with only a light monthly touch from Guy to add the few discounts still handled manually. He reckons it saves around three hours a month. The workflow now looks like this:

• Software costs recharged directly from the Xero invoice
• Direct debit set up automatically for every new client
• Other costs, across Dext, QuickBooks, payroll and confirmation fees, imported into XPM
• Payments collected through Stripe, with price rises applied at the new rate

After: Results + proof

What changed (Before → After)

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Day-to-day impact

Day to day, the biggest change is certainty. The annual pricing review, cross-checking the Xero invoice against Practice Ignition, is gone, and with it the worry that a client somewhere was on the wrong rate.

"Previously it was a regular thing, we had to check pricing. Now you trust that it's doing what it's supposed to do." — Guy Worthington, Accounts Manager, Hysons Chartered Accountants

Business impact

With the partner discount but no reliable way to pass costs on, Hysons had been losing around £500 to £750 a month on its Xero subscriptions, about 10%. That has reversed: the recharges now run at a profit of roughly £1,250 a month, about 20%. That figure is before Rechargly and Stripe fees and excludes a few ledgers the firm does not recharge, but a monthly loss is now a monthly profit.

"It works out that we are actually making money on the Xero subscriptions now, which covers the admin time we have." — Guy Worthington, Accounts Manager, Hysons Chartered Accountants

Cash flow is cleaner too: the recharge arrives before the Xero direct debit goes out, so the firm no longer funds the subscriptions itself. Client pushback has largely gone as well, because increases now read as a cost recharged from Xero rather than a fee the firm chose to raise.

Bottom line

Hysons replaced an annual review it was always tempted to postpone with a system that recharges costs straight from the source. Recharges that used to lose the firm money now turn a profit, and the job it once put off looks after itself.