This is the monthly pricing for IRIS Openbooks
5 clients £75
10 clients £145 increase £70
20 clients £280 increase £135
30 clients £420 increase £140
50 clients £675 increase £255
75 clients £1,012.33 increase £337.33
100 clients £1,300 increase £287.67
150 clients £1,800 increase £500
While the average price seems reasonable the marginal cost of one extra client is incredible high. If you have 150 clients signed up and you get one more they will cost you £500 per month.
At small levels the prices are equally bizarre. You have five clients costing an average of £15 each but your 6th client will cost you £70.
I pointed this out to an IRIS salesman today and he confirmed this was how the pricing worked. I had previously been under the impression that the prices were just examples at different quantities but I was told these are the bands.
Either the IRIS salesman has got it wrong or IRIS have priced themselves out of the market.
Replies (13)
Please login or register to join the discussion.
Peter - last sentence
possibly both lol
where has your comment gone now have you been got at.....
It's outrageous...
I find I have the same problem with Jaffa Cakes. If I want 13 Jaffa Cakes I have to buy 2 boxes, making the marginal cost for that 1 extra Jaffa Cake about £1.
And Tesco won't let me open another box to buy a single Jaffa Cake.
Calm down dear...
I could, but I don't want or need them.
And you could... get some extra clients. It's no different.
Similar situation with Iris
I'm on a starter pack 100 and towards the end of the year, I needed an additional 5-10 sets of accounts. I had to move up to starter pack 150 - the price jump for the band was quite high.
But I suppose that's a feature of band pricing, the marginal cost only starts to come down when you get towards the end of the bracket.
"I disagree."
It seems that anyone who doesn't agree with you is 'useless, 'incompetent' or talking 'nonsense'. No wonder people prefer to remain anonymous.
I guess the Jaffa Cake analogy was a flippant observation to prove a point. Whatever pricing structure is choosen, it won't be to everyone's liking. If IRIS charged £x per client, someone would complain that there's no volume discount or moan about the inconvenience of having to 'upgrade' every time they wanted to add an extra client. Or if they tried to combine the two price structures, there would be complaints that the pricing was too complicated.
Sometimes in life you have to buy something you don't need in order to get what you want; whether that's Sky TV packages, mobile phone tariffs, packets of Jaffa Cakes, or some other product or service.
Who knows, you may even have some clients who would prefer it if you had a different fee structure...
Sorted
Hi Peter - you'll be glad to hear that the marginal cost problem has been acknowledged and Iris will be allowing incremental (2 at a time) add ons at the lower end, so give them another call. The downside is that, as a consequence, they have shelved their original plan to give away 20 packets of jaffa cakes when you hit the next order level...hey ho.
Early days
Hi Peter - been on trial with freeserve & then openbooks for nearly 2 months to get the feel for it and have only in the last week started introducing clients. Lilely to have 2-3 to sign on in the next couple of weeks and then anticipate batches of 2-3 at a time, mainly as we don't have the capacity for mass sign up & initial hand holding.
The pricing structure fits in with how we bill generally, ie who benefits from it. If it's mainly us, ie in those cases where we actually keep the books but it would be good to get the client involved, then I'll pay the cost year 1, in others where there's either a shared or major benefit for the client then we might recover 1-4 times the cost in year one. Ultimately though, where most of the take up will be from spreadsheet using clients, one major benefit for us will be better effeciency in supporting & monitoring their books, VAT, tax, dividends etc.
Clients I've shown it to have been really impressed. There will be others who will want to keep on struggling with spreadsheets or even QBs, MYOB, Sage etc but at least we are offering them an alternative and so if again this year they make a bit of a mess of their books, VAT etc, then it will be easier to justify the extra charges to put it right.