Definitely yes!

Your product and your time are valuable and that should be recognised. Also, neither you nor the company you pilot with will benefit from you running any financial risks.

But...there are various things you can do to ensure that the pilotcompany feels just as recognised as you do. Just some thoughts:
- Cost prices only during the pilot
- Engineer on site during pilot to immediately fix things
- Special discounts
- Lifelong premium service for free
- Be a prominent use case (they might need the innovative publicity)

Good luck!

Even though you might not like the fact that this employee has been shopping around it appears that there's a demand for his/her skills. That makes me wonder how hard it would be for you to replace this person.

Whilst making your decision you need to consider the following:
- Am I happy/satisfied with this worker as an employee, professional and person?
- How hard would it be to replace this person (calculate the time required for recruitment, induction, training and of course the fact that you'll probably have to say no to potential customers on the short term)

Based on these elements you'll likely find that it will make your life a lot easier to indeed give the raise. But perhaps you can create some additional conditions like increasing responsibility to bring in more sales, or coaching/training future new employees to balance out the higher pay.

Good luck and you know where to find me if you've got more questions!

If you're lucky enough to find a financial and administrative all-rounder than definitely go for it! But...they're pretty rare and especially on the bookkeeping front you want to make sure you've got the best possible expertise.

I've been an (interim) CFO (that included doing all the bookkeeping) of a startup for 2 years even though my financial skills aren't superstrong. We managed to make this work by:
- making sure the financial processes were as automated as possible
- our accounting tool was easy to use and linked to our other tools
- having an amazingly skilled and flexible accountant on speeddial. I could literally contact him on Skype chat at any time if I needed help.

This could also be a potential solution for you. If not, I would suggest choosing 2 separate people whereby you should NOT save money on the bookkeeper as it is so incredibly important.

All the best and let me know if I can help you with some more insights!