Professional fees in India are usually discussed in private and quoted without explanation. I am going to do the opposite and set out how I actually price cross-border advisory work, and why.

The three shapes of engagement

Almost everything I do falls into one of three shapes, and each is priced differently because each carries a different kind of risk.

Compliance work is priced per cycle. Returns, filings, audits, the annual calendar. The scope is known, the effort is predictable, and the price should be too. A client should be able to budget this for the year without surprises, and I should not be re-quoting every quarter. If a compliance engagement keeps producing unexpected bills, the scoping was wrong.

Advisory work is priced per question. How should this structure be set up? What is the exposure on this arrangement? What does this notice mean and what should we do? These are bounded pieces of thinking with a defined output, and they are priced as a piece of work, not by the hour.

Ongoing access is priced as a retainer. For clients who want someone who knows their whole position and is available when something comes up, the retainer covers the conversations and the continuity. It does not cover project work, and I say so explicitly.

Why I moved away from hourly

Hourly billing misaligns everyone. It rewards me for being slow and penalises me for knowing the answer. A question I can settle in twenty minutes because I have seen it forty times is worth more to the client than one I take six hours to research, and hourly billing prices those exactly backwards.

It also makes clients ration their questions. The single most damaging thing in an advisory relationship is a client who does not call because they are mentally counting the meter. The call they do not make is invariably the one that would have been cheapest to answer early.

Fixed pricing per piece of work puts the risk of my efficiency on me, which is where it belongs.

What actually drives the number

When I price a piece of cross-border work, four things move the figure:

  • How many jurisdictions are involved. Two is a normal engagement. Four is a different exercise, because the positions have to be consistent across all of them and each has its own documentation requirements
  • Whether the position is prospective or historic. Structuring something before it happens is cheaper than defending something that already did. Retrospective work carries the cost of reconstruction, and reconstruction is slow
  • The quality of the records. A client with clean books and organised documents is genuinely cheaper to serve, and I price that difference rather than pretending it does not exist
  • The consequence of being wrong. Work where a misjudgement is expensive requires more review, more documentation and more care. That is real effort and it is priced in

What does not drive the number: the size of the client’s business, or the amount of tax at stake. I know firms that price as a percentage of tax saved. I find it distorts the advice, because it gives the adviser a financial interest in the aggressive position.

Where I will not compromise

I do not quote an unconditional fixed fee for an unbounded problem. If nobody knows how large the backlog is or what the records contain, I price a diagnostic phase, deliver a finding, and price the rest with both of us informed. Clients who insist on a single number for an unmeasured problem are, in my experience, the clients for whom the problem turns out to be much larger than described.

I also do not discount to win work and recover it later through scope creep. If the price is wrong, the honest response is to say so rather than to price low and bill the difference in instalments the client did not expect.

What clients should ask any adviser

Three questions, and the answers tell you more than the fee itself. What is explicitly not included? What happens to the price if the work turns out to be larger than expected — who carries that? And what does year two look like, not year one?

An adviser with clear answers has thought about the engagement. One who only has a number for the first invoice is quoting for the easy part.

The underlying principle

Price should reflect the value of the judgement, not the hours it took to produce, and it should be knowable in advance. A client who is surprised by an invoice will not call the next time they should.

Firm-level mandates — audit, transfer pricing documentation, group structuring — are priced the same way through AeTx. Scope stated, price fixed, exclusions written down.