Is Your Firm Quietly Paying for Its Clients' Software?

Here's a question that may not be asked enough at firms selling CAS: when a vendor raises its price, does your client's bill go up too, or does your margin go down?

Most firms bundle software into a fixed monthly fee and move on. But the costs inside that fee don't stay fixed. Intro discounts expire, vendors raise prices, a client adds three employees and you add three licenses. If nobody connects those changes to billing, the firm eats the difference.

TwineApps is betting that's a bigger leak than most firms realize. Its first product, Twine Biller, went live in the QuickBooks app marketplace (Apps.com) this week, timed to Intuit Connect in Las Vegas. It tracks the software subscriptions a firm buys on behalf of clients and turns them into rebilling invoices that get pushed into QuickBooks Online. Clients just receive a normal QuickBooks invoice and never need a Twine Biller login.

The origin story should grab your attention. Co-founder Trent Yesberg runs an accounting firm in Australia. While testing the tool on his own book, his team found more than AU$26,000 a year in recurring software charges that weren't being recovered correctly. That was across about 300 clients, or roughly AU$86 per client per year. None of it was dramatic. It came from missed invoices, new clients never added to billing, headcount changes, and plan switches. Those are the kinds of small changes that slip through when the person buying the software isn't the person doing the billing.

That's really the point for our readers. Whether or not you use Twine Biller, it's worth asking:

• Who in your firm owns the list of software you pay for on clients' behalf?
• When was it last reconciled against what you actually bill?
• Does your engagement letter say whether software is a pass-through, a markup, or part of the fixed fee? And does it give you a way to adjust when costs change?

Twine Biller works in all QuickBooks Online markets, including the US, Canada, the UK, the EU, and Australia, and supports AUD, USD, GBP, EUR and NZD. There's a 45-day free trial, which is about two monthly billing cycles to see whether you have a leak.

My challenge to you: pull your client software list this week and compare it with last month's invoices. If the numbers don't match, you've found margin you're already earning but not collecting.

View Twine Biller in the QuickBooks app marketplace: https://quickbooks.intuit.com/app/apps/appdetails/twinebiller/