Getting paid is the part of practice management that most software treats as an afterthought, bolted on as a basic invoice-and-email feature while the vendor's real attention goes elsewhere. It is also the part where firms are most wary of being quietly charged twice: once for the practice management subscription, and again as a cut of every payment their clients make. That second charge is common in the wider software market, where a platform that helped a firm win a piece of work then takes a percentage of the revenue that work generated, on top of whatever the firm already pays in subscription fees.
It is not how Accupe's invoicing and payments work, and this piece explains exactly what does happen, from the invoice being raised to the money actually landing, in enough detail that a firm can price its engagements with a clear picture of what actually leaves the client's account and what the firm actually keeps.
The distinction is worth taking seriously because it compounds. A software fee that skims a percentage off every invoice looks trivial on a single £500 job and becomes a genuinely large number once a firm is billing several hundred thousand pounds a year through the same system. Firms evaluating practice management software should treat this question, does the vendor take a cut of client payments, as a first-order pricing question, not a footnote.
Where invoicing sits in the client record
Every client record in Accupe carries an Invoices tab alongside its documents, jobs and tasks, showing the complete billing history for that client: what has been paid, what is pending, and what is overdue. An invoice can be raised directly against a job, so the fee agreed at the start of an engagement flows through to billing without being re-typed, or created as a one-off for ad hoc work.
Once raised, the invoice can be sent straight to the client through the same portal that already holds their documents and messages, rather than as a separate PDF attached to a separate email from a separate system the client has to recognise and trust before they will open it. A recurring engagement, an annual accounts job that runs every year on the same client, can carry its invoice trigger through to the next cycle automatically, so billing follows the same rhythm as the work itself rather than being reconstructed from scratch each time.
This also means a manager closing out a job does not need to separately notify whoever handles billing that the work is finished and ready to invoice. The fee sits against the job from the moment the engagement was agreed, so raising the invoice at completion is a matter of confirming the figure rather than reconstructing it from a fee proposal, a scope-change email and a partner's recollection of what was actually agreed months earlier.
How the client actually pays
When a client opens an invoice in the Client Hub, payment happens through an embedded Stripe checkout rather than a redirect to an unfamiliar third-party page. The client enters card details once, the payment is processed by Stripe, and the invoice status updates automatically, moving from pending to paid without anyone on the firm's side needing to reconcile a bank statement against an invoice number by hand.
For a firm that used to spend part of every Friday afternoon matching incoming payments to outstanding invoices, cross-checking a bank feed against a spreadsheet of who still owes what, this alone removes a recurring piece of admin that added nothing to the client relationship and existed purely because two systems were not talking to each other. The client, meanwhile, pays from the same phone they already used to upload their bank statements and sign their accounts approval, rather than being sent off to a payment page that looks like it belongs to a different company entirely.
The fee structure, stated plainly
This is the part firms most want a straight answer on, so here it is without qualification.
- Accupe charges a 0% platform fee on payments processed through the platform
- Stripe's own card processing fee still applies, because Stripe is the payment processor doing the actual work of moving the money securely
- Funds settle to the firm's own Stripe account, not to a pooled account Accupe controls
- The firm sees exactly what Stripe charged on each transaction, because it is the firm's Stripe account, not Accupe's
What Stripe's own fee actually looks like
As published on Stripe's own pricing pages, a standard UK card payment costs 1.5% plus a small fixed fee, with a higher rate applying to premium UK cards, a further step up for EEA cards, and a higher rate again for international cards, plus an additional charge where currency conversion is involved. In the UAE, Stripe's published standard rate for a domestic card payment sits around 2.9% plus a small fixed fee per transaction, again with an additional percentage for international cards and for currency conversion.
These are Stripe's rates, set by Stripe, published on Stripe's own pricing pages, and subject to change on Stripe's schedule rather than Accupe's. A firm evaluating the true cost of taking a card payment should check Stripe's current published pricing directly before finalising how it prices an engagement, because the gap between the standard domestic rate and the rate for a premium or international card is real enough to matter on a large invoice, and a firm with a significant proportion of overseas clients paying by international card should factor that difference into its fee structure rather than assuming every payment lands at the headline domestic rate.
The gap between the UK and UAE headline rates is also worth a firm actually noticing rather than assuming the two markets work out the same. A firm running both a UK and a UAE book, common among practices serving clients with cross-border interests, will see a meaningfully higher standard processing rate on the AED-denominated side of the business, purely because that is where Stripe's own UAE pricing sits, not because Accupe treats the two regions any differently.
Why this distinction matters more than it sounds
It is worth being explicit about a phrase firms sometimes use loosely: with a 0% Accupe platform fee, a firm never has money skimmed off the top by the practice management software itself. It does not follow that the firm "keeps 100%" of what the client pays, because Stripe's processing fee is a real cost of accepting a card payment at all, charged by Stripe to any business using Stripe anywhere, independent of Accupe entirely.
A firm that quotes a client a fee of £500 and receives a card payment for it will see Stripe's fee deducted from that £500 before the balance settles, exactly as it would if the firm used Stripe directly through its own website with no practice management software involved. Accupe simply does not add a second deduction on top, which is a meaningfully different proposition from a vendor that quietly takes its own percentage on every transaction in addition to a subscription fee, and it is worth a firm actually checking any billing tool it is considering against this exact question before assuming the fee structures are comparable, since the answer is rarely volunteered clearly in a vendor's own marketing.
Put another way: two firms of identical size, one using Accupe and one using a platform that takes an additional one percent of every invoice on top of its own subscription, will pay Stripe roughly the same processing cost on their card volume, but only one of them is also handing a slice of every single invoice it raises, month after month, year after year, to the practice management vendor as a matter of course. Across a firm billing meaningfully into six figures a year, that difference in structure is not a rounding error, and it is exactly the kind of cost that is easy to miss when comparing subscription price alone rather than the full cost of getting paid.
A worked example, end to end
A Growth-plan firm raises a £1,200 invoice against a completed annual accounts job. The client opens the invoice in the portal three days later and pays by card. Stripe processes the payment, applies its standard UK card rate, and settles the net amount to the firm's own Stripe account, typically within a couple of business days depending on the firm's payout schedule. Back inside Accupe, the invoice flips to Paid automatically, the Smart Board card for the job updates, and the transaction sits permanently in the client's Invoices tab.
A UAE firm on the same plan raising an equivalent AED-denominated invoice follows the identical mechanics: the client pays through the embedded Stripe checkout, Stripe applies its published UAE card rate, and the invoice updates automatically the moment the payment clears. In both cases, the firm paid its Accupe subscription as usual and Stripe's standard processing fee on that one transaction; it paid nothing additional to Accupe for the privilege of getting paid.
Now take the same invoice and imagine the client does not pay within a few days. Rather than the firm needing to remember to chase, an unpaid invoice sitting in the pending state is visible on the client's Invoices tab and on the firm-wide billing view, so a manager reviewing outstanding fees at the end of the month sees it alongside every other unpaid invoice across the client book, rather than needing to check each client's record individually to find out who still owes what.
What it does not do
Accupe's invoicing is not a full accounting or bookkeeping ledger, and it does not replace the firm's own books-of-record software such as Xero or Zoho Books; it raises and tracks client-facing invoices and their payment status. It does not offer instalment plans, direct debit collection, or a proposal-and-billing workflow of the kind a dedicated tool like Ignition specialises in; firms whose billing needs go beyond invoice-and-pay may still want a billing specialist alongside Accupe. And it cannot change what Stripe charges to process a card, because that fee is set entirely outside Accupe's control.
It also does not currently offer bank transfer as an alternative to card payment inside the same checkout flow; a client who wants to pay by bank transfer still does so outside the platform, with the firm marking the invoice as paid manually once the funds are confirmed on the firm's own bank statement. For firms whose client base pays predominantly by card, this is rarely a practical limitation; for firms whose larger corporate clients prefer bank transfer as a matter of policy, it is worth planning for as a manual step rather than assuming every invoice will resolve itself automatically.
What changes for the firm
Firms that move client billing into the same system as the rest of the engagement describe less time spent reconciling payments against outstanding invoices, because the two are the same record rather than two separate ones someone has to keep in sync. And because the fee structure is transparent, a partner pricing a fixed-fee engagement can quote a figure knowing exactly what leaves the client's account and, aside from Stripe's own published processing rate, what the firm actually receives.
There is also a slower, cumulative benefit that shows up over a full year rather than on any single invoice: a client who pays through the same portal they already use for documents and signatures builds a habit around that portal that carries over to everything else the firm asks of them. A payment experience that feels consistent with the rest of the relationship, rather than a jarring handoff to a separate system, reinforces the same trust the rest of the Hub is built to establish, and it makes the invoice itself feel like a natural final step in the engagement rather than an awkward, separate transaction bolted onto the end of the relationship. Firms that have run both models describe the difference less in terms of any single payment and more in the general sense that billing stopped feeling like the one slightly clunky, slightly separate part of an otherwise smooth client experience the rest of the firm had already invested in getting right.
