What is one client worth to the practice?

The calculator multiplies a year of fees (twelve months of recurring work plus the annual return or year-end fee) by your gross margin to get a year of profit per client, then by the years a client stays. Dividing a year of each plan's fee by that profit gives the number of new clients it would need to bring in a year to break even, first on year-one profit alone and then on lifetime profit.

Two things it leaves out on purpose. It doesn't guess how many clients search will bring, because that depends on your market, your competition and your pages, and nobody can promise it. And it doesn't count referrals that a new client later sends, which for many practices are where the real value sits.

If the "on lifetime" column reads 1 for the plan you're considering, a single retained client covers a year of the work. That is the honest frame for a search budget: not a guaranteed return, but a small number of clients against a known fee. The plan schedule has every price, and accounting firm marketing covers how search fits next to referrals and other channels.