What does AI yield an accountancy firm per client?

If an AI connector on the client administration saves you one hour of research per client per month, the figures add up quickly: twelve hours per client per year, times the average hourly rate of €105, comes to €1,260 per client. Forty clients further on and you have over €50,000 in hours on the counter.

What AI delivers an accountancy firm per client therefore depends on two numbers: the hours you save and the rate at which you book them. That first number is an assumption, and that is precisely why this is a calculation and not a promise. The industry figures that do exist form the skeleton, your own hours fill it in, and the cheapest way to test it is thirty days of measuring on your own files.

Start with the rate: what is an hour worth at your firm?

The rate is the best documented part of the sum. The most recent industry benchmark (2025, nearly four hundred accountancy and administration firms from 5 to 120 FTE) puts the average hourly rate at €105; the top-performing twenty percent of firms average €126. Feel free to use your own rate, the average is only the starting point.

The hours are trickier. A public industry figure for research per file does not exist, so you fill in that part yourself. That is why the sum remains conditional:

• if AI saves you one hour per client per month, that is 12 hours per client per year;
• 12 hours times €105 is €1,260 per client per year;
• with forty client administrations that adds up to over €50,000.

If it is half an hour at your firm, halve the outcome. If you are at two hours, double it. The point is not the exact number, but that the sum looks so small per client and grows so large per firm. If part of those hours shifts to billable work, it counts double: average productivity in the industry sits at 73%, the top 20% reaches 84%.

See where that hour per client sits

The hour rarely sits in a single task. It sits in checking reconciliations, reviewing suspense accounts, requesting the ageing analysis of debtors, placing VAT categories alongside the general ledger. And in the questions in between: a client calls about their turnover, a colleague is looking for an entry, someone exports yet another report to Excel to compare two columns.

With Exact AI Connect you connect your own AI assistant, for example Claude or ChatGPT, directly to the client administrations in Exact Online. You ask your control questions in plain English and get an answer with the underlying entries included. You work per administration: select the client, run fixed checks, move on to the next. This is deliberately a guided way of working, not a button that analyses fifty administrations at once, and precisely because of that it is easy to standardise into a fixed control list per file.

The division of roles stays classic. The AI searches, counts and flags; your people assess what a deviation means. If the AI wants to create or change something, that always goes through an explicit confirmation step beforehand.

Factor in capacity too: hours you cannot buy in

For many firms the euro is not even the strongest argument. In a large 2024 study (among 865 accountants and SMEs) 59% of accountancy firms reported a staff shortage, and in early 2025 ING also found that almost two thirds of business services firms are dealing with shortages. The 2025 firms benchmark counts over 12% of the average firm's headcount as open vacancies, and accountancy vacancies stay open for eight months on average.

In that market an hour saved is not one less cost item, but capacity you simply would not get otherwise. It goes to advisory work left undone, or to the client you would otherwise have had to turn down. The sector sees this too: in the spring 2025 business survey 45.7% of accountancy and administration firms said they were tackling the shortage with more automation, the highest percentage of all sectors.

And the sum grows along with the rates. Average rates rose by 4.8% in 2025, an increase for the fourth year running; if that trend continues, every hour you free up now will be worth more next year.

Test the sum in thirty days on three files

Against the return stands a clear investment. Exact AI Connect costs €29 per user per month (Essentials, questions and reports directly on Exact Online) or €79 (Analytics, which also handles analyses on large datasets such as multi-year comparisons). You can read which of the two suits your firm in our comparison of Essentials and Analytics.

For firms it is mainly the tiered pricing that counts. Each licence includes one administration; you connect extra client administrations for €10 to €25 each per month, and that rate drops the more you connect. Pay annually and another 10% comes off. Set that against the hourly rate of €105: one hour saved per month more than covers an Essentials licence plus a series of extra administrations.

Testing costs nothing. The trial period lasts 30 days, includes all features and covers up to three administrations. Pick three representative clients, give an employee a fixed checklist and clock the difference for four weeks. After that your calculation no longer rests on assumptions but on your own figures. No set-up costs, cancellable monthly, and you work with an ISO 27001 certified, independently pentested connector from an official Exact Online partner.

Example prompts for your test month

Copy these questions into your connected AI assistant and turn them into your fixed checklist per file:

Select administration [client name]; is there anything on the suspense account for cross entries?

Which debtors older than 90 days do you see in this administration?

Show last month's profit and loss account and compare it with the month before.

Which general ledger accounts deviate more than 25 percent from last year this year?

List the reconciliation checks for the file: VAT categories, suspense accounts, debtor and creditor ageing.

Do the sum yourself. Start 30 days free →