Slate Bookkeeping
A two-person practice that looked like a hobby next to the firms it kept beating on price.
- Sector
- Bookkeeping and payroll
- Year
- 2025
- What we made
- Brand identity/Website design/Proposal template/Email signatures
Slate
Bookkeeping / Payroll
The problem
Slate won on service and lost on first impressions. Prospects compared a free email address and a template site against firms with real branding, and stopped reading before they got to the rates. The owners were spending an hour on every proposal, rebuilding the same document in a word processor.
The approach
A flat, confident identity: one weight of a serif for headings, a plain sans for numbers, and a lot of white space so a page of figures does not feel like a page of figures. The site opens with pricing, because that is what the client is looking for and hiding it only costs a call. The proposal template rebuilds from the same type styles, so a quote takes ten minutes and looks like the website.
The outcome
Slate now shows up to a pitch with a proposal that matches the site and the signature on the email. Proposals go out the same day. The practice raised its onboarding fee twice in a year without a single client asking why.
What changed
Sample figures for the template. Put your own numbers here, or delete the block. Never publish a figure you cannot show a client where it came from.
Sample figure
+52%
proposal acceptance rate
Sample figure
10 min
to send a branded quote
Sample figure
0
free email addresses left
From the studio
Work in progress.
$
Figures set in the plain sans
Why panels, not screenshots
The concept blocks above are drawn in plain CSS from the type and color system, so this template never shows a logo that belongs to somebody else. Replace them with photographs or screens of your own work when you make the site yours.
Next case study
Kestrel Outdoor Co.
Outdoor gear and guided trips