Answer - Both, but at different times.
Your decision between having a rate setting specialist do your rate analysis or doing yourself your own calculations should turn on several decision criteria. Three of the most useful are investment payback period, return on investment and the amount of rate increase achieved.
Our latest number crunching shows that during the last three years our clients will enjoy a a return on investment rate (on our fees) of about 44,461 percent for the five year period following their rate analyses. Even for the smallest clients that rate usually is 7,000 percent or more. Do-it-yourselfers usually achieve a rate of return around 1,000 percent if the rate increase needed is small and perhaps 10,000 percent if it is large.
Our clients' payback period averages 1.02 days (4.10 when the largest six clients are disregarded). The payback period for do-it-yourselfers varies a lot and usually runs from 10 to 40 days.
Why does do-it-yourself rate analysis lag so far behind those done by Carl Brown Consulting? Generally do-it-yourselfers can do whatever level of analysis they do cheaper than we can do a comprehensive rate analysis. However, we discover more financial need than do-it-yourselfers generally find. And we can better justify setting rates to satisfy those needs. Therefore, you will almost always get higher rates passed when we do the analysis and advisement than when you do it yourself. Besides that, we catch the arrows from your ratepayers instead of you.
This is not to say that do-it-yourself is worse than having a specialist do your rate analysis or calculations. In fact, do-it-yourself is the right way to go during all the years when you just need inflationary increases and your rate structure is already in pretty good shape. That is most years. Only every five years or so should you hire a specialist to get your rates back in great shape.
Hire it done by a specialist about once every five years and then do the calculations yourself during the in-between years and you will achieve the optimum return and payback rates.