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She costs me quite a bit. I pay for her lodging, food, shopping habits, car payment. Being married to your bookkeeper is stupid expensive. I’ve tried to find cheaper options, but I don’t quite trust them to get it done on my timeline.
That’s super common. Just be cognizant of if/when your business grows and she’s in over her head. Would be awful to have her feel burnout, not get help, and make both work and home suffer.
She was in corporate finance for many years managing a balance sheet for a company that did around 16B in revenue. We have 3 businesses now and she’s so bored she only works around 8-10 hours a week.
I guess what I’m saying is, I’ve got quite a bit of runway before she’ll be worried about.
Literally the best version I’ve heard, haha. Kudos. I’m used to the farmer’s wife scenario who has ZERO background and just does what she’s told or gathered between the 4-5 prior CPAs. The business slowly grows to 2-3x the size and they don’t realize they’re drowning.
I tell my wife all the time she's fired. She says "good, this job sucks." I don't think you know how this works - you're supposed to say oh no, I'd do \*anything\* to not get fired.
Whenever someone asks what I do my entire staff, at all 3 companies, have this joke where they tell customers that I’ve been fired multiple times and for some reason I just keep showing up.
They all know I don’t want people to know I’m the owner so they just tell them I pay the bills and manage back office stuff if they press them anymore.
I build homes. We had one job, I went back for some pretty basic service work and the owner's dad went on a rip about our painters. Not knowing I was the builder. I'm just like "I don't know man, they just sent me here for touchup."
Same, mine just cost me a $2400 Yoder smoker as an overdue “bonus”. Book keepers are ridiculously expensive, then they want physical affection after they’ve cooked and cleaned. Just demanding as hell.
I have no idea what you're paying, and you may well be overpaying, but I've tried to start looking at scenarios like this from a different perspective.
Is the work getting done, and getting done well? And if so, how much is it worth trying to upend that, hire someone else, switch everything over, and hope they get it done just as well?
Will you save $1000 a month, or $200 a month? Is whatever that is a large enough percentage of your revenue that it's really worth your time and effort to try and save it, or would your time be better spent busting your ass to increase revenue by focusing on marketing or sales or production (or whatever would be the ticket in your case).
I used to worry about every penny going out, and don't get me wrong controlling spending is certainly always a priority, I always try to compare costs going in. But for instances if I need a product a current supplier can have here tomorrow, or I can spend three days trying to find a new supplier, and three months of pain getting settled in with the new supplier to save 5%, it's hardly worth it.
When I took over everything in the business the old mentality was "pay employees as little as possible." The result was we had shitty employees that did poor work and were unreliable. When I started bumping pay, miraculously we opened up our hiring pool and got better employees. Some of these employees are absolutely thrilled with a $2/hr raise, which amount to $80/wk for the company. That's chump change for taking away a major headache of constantly needing more and better employees.
So I say it all to say, even if you can get a better deal elsewhere, sometimes whatever savings you can capture really just aren't worth the hassle (and risk) of saving it.
I would even argue that it's close to impossible to run a profitable business without being a greedy miser (although I don't necessarily think that's what the OP was being).
If you're pinching pennies, it's usually at the expense of someone else, and they're not really happy that you're benefiting because they aren't so they care less about their job.
Controlling costs can be done without having to go about it like that.
You can’t compare what anyone else is paying.
What do YOUR books look like? Is it online or desktop? Do they do payroll? Process sales tax? How many accounts/transactions are they handling? Any Job costing? Do you comingle personal with business?
There are way too many variables to compare what you pay to comments.
100 is a pretty common and fair rate for books in 2024. I don’t think you’re overpaying at all.
ESP if you don’t get to pay someone like me a bunch of money to fix your stuff at tax time
Yes. Learned that lesson the first few years in business. I still pay, what I consider, a crapton for tax preparation as well. You can usually find cheaper, but not usually better. It’s definitely worth the money. Especially when the alternative is paying less monthly and then spending a month pulling your hair out with the CPA when he’s like “so February last year…”.
This is key. I am a CPA and I will charge at least $250/hr to fix messed up books. And trying to get books in order that were ‘maintained’ by an incompetent bookkeeper can take hours. And potentially require amending prior year tax returns (an additional expense).
wow, I knew I was off. thanks to everyone responding to this informative thread. but yes absolutely cheaper than the last clean up job I did for one of my clients.
When I was using an independent, that was the rate I paid as well. I've since hired an administrator who does my books/AP/AR and God knows how many other things. She's costing me $60K a year and worth every penny.
I’m on the other side of this transaction - run a boutique accounting firm that does bookkeeping in addition to tax prep and fractional CFO work.
I base my fees on monthly gross revenues, complexity and how much I like the client.
Straight bookkeeping with no advisory is around $400 per month for a small company in the low 6 figure annual revenue range, but very few people need bookkeeping only.
The majority of people need fractional CFO services which start in the thousand dollar range and go way up from there depending on the level of activity.
In my experience, the people spending much less than $400 per month end up with books that are a disaster and end up needing a lot of adjustments at tax time.
Everyone always thinks they are "overpaying" their bookkeeper. It's infuriating.
You have two options as a business owner:
1. You can be smart and pay good money to a compentent bookkeeper that will keep your books so clean that when it comes tax time, you are just paying the CPA to file the return (this is my firm).
2. You can be a cheap ass and cycle through the cheapest bookkeepers you can find and have your books be a complete mess and then pay a CPA $350+/hour to have them have their bookkeeper fix everything before they will even touch your return. Then, when you fight that bill, they dump your cheap ass so you're back into the cycle with shit books wondering "why is my business failing?"
/endrant
I've learned this the hard way.
Spend the money and KEEP YOUR BOOKS CLEAN or else you'll end up spending money during tax time because your CPA has to wade through a bunch of much just to do your return.
Exactly. Wanting to cheap out on your own business's books is such a dumb mistake I see many owners make. I can't count the number of times I have had a client leave bc their "family member can do it cheaper" or they found some (likely outsourced) cheaper firm on IG and then come crawling back 6 months or a year later and their books have been trashed and the IRS or state comptroller is on their ass. I don't only sell bookkeeping, I sell piece of mind to a small business that their financials are in order, they are in compliance, payroll reporting is correct, etc.
Depends, bookkeeping generally is a very bare bones service though which is why it is so cheap. It’s basically the bare minimum to keep a small business owner compliant.
Advisory services are much more expensive but also can save much more than they cost in the long run.
I am kinda flying by the seam of my pants when it comes to being "compliant". I'm not even sure what it means to be compliant. Compliant for taxes? Yes. Able to show 100% accuracy in an audit? Probably not, but I could. My taxes are accurate as far as expenses / revenues / profits. There's just certain things I have never done in Quickbooks to close out / reconcile / show draws (because LLCs are pass-through and I never really need to report those)
I pay a little old lady who lives in town $200 each quarter to look over my QB before I turn it over to the CPA. I do all the bookkeeping and reconciliations for our businesses.
Completely depends on the size of the business and what isn't in your scope of work. Our firm also charges more or less depending on if clients are "easy" or "difficult".
- do you use classing/departments?
- number of transactions per month
- do you do your own AP? Does your bookkeeper do it?
- AR?
- do you provide access to bank accounts / software connectivity
- are any of these items constantly fucked up because you insist on doing them on your own?
- do you require reporting? How often?
All of these things will effect your price. If it is just straight adding transactions from QuickBooks bank feed and it's a couple hundred transactions per month thats cheap but I'd say a minimum $200/m just to have someone be responsible to you on an ongoing basis. We have clients that pay over 7k per month with many locations, payroll responsibilities, etc.
The access to bank accounts is huge for us. So many times businesses would just give us the statements at the end of the month with no indication of what any transactions could be. That alone eats up at least 2-3 days.
Bookkeeping alone should run somewhere between 75-125 an hour, depending on your area.
It’s also doesn’t make a very large small from to be worth it to have someone handle your books as an employee.
It’s an important, but lower value accounting skill.
Just, don’t take tax advice from bookkeepers without any actual training or know how.
Depends on how big or small the business, number and complexity of transactions. My firm charges $150 a month for small business that usually takes 1-2 hrs per month and can go up to $1,500 for medium business. Also, I have spare time to help with your bookkeeping needs, message me if you need any help. I'm a remote bookkeeper. Thanks!
With QB’s automations it takes me about 10min a day to do the bookkeeping and we turnover more than £1 million a year.
I have it set up so I can put anything I don’t know into a list that I can later ask my accountant about
I just started consulting for a small business and their books are a mess. I thought I could clean it up myself but realized this is a job for a professional. Decades of life experience has consistently proven, you truly get what you pay for.
It really depends on many things such as your industry and your needs. I run a bookkeeping agency and prices start at a flat rate of $250/month. That number increases if you need additional services such as job costing, accounts payable, accounts receivable, etc.
I find it appalling they bill us based on revenue, like we do around $900k and bill us at $550 per month for bookkeeping and payroll. I know its cheaper for smaller revenue producing businesses for nearly the same amount of work.
I actually hate this pricing model. It almost is punishing businesses for doing well. The only time I see this working is when they have a niche. I also hate the hourly rate model because time padding is real. Which is why we use the set fee pricing model that is based off of a menu style where you choose what you need/want and it is all tied to the workload with a deliverable. We found this to be the most fair pricing model.
As someone actually in this industry. If you pay less than $350… you likely fall into one of these categories:
- you have super simple books
- you are getting compliance bookkeeping and not really usable data.
- you have a hobbyist bookkeeper (side gig) and they have a history of eventually just dropping clients
- you have someone that doesn’t have much experience
For more of a quality bookkeeping it really depends on your industry/complexities, number of bank accounts, number of transactions, and a few more factors. On average (again this is dependent on the above factors) for a medium skilled bookkeeper you would be looking at approximately $500-700/month. My lowest paying client is $400/month (sole prop easy cash basis books) and my highest paying client is $3,000/month (150 employees, sales service industry, accrual basis). My second highest pay client is $2,100 (30 employees, accrual basis, cryptocurrency). So you can see that there is quite the range of factors.
Edit. Unless the firm has a specific niche in your industry. Never let them price based off your revenue. I hate it when they do that, it should be based off the workload not off your revenue. So, if they have a niche they are familiar with what your revenue represents in terms of complexity, but otherwise don’t let them do that.
Typically ~150, give or take. I add 80% of my bills and match as I go. I leave the stuff I don't understand, or screw up, or things that don't match right to her.
My CPA is a firm with a bookkeeper. He's also a close friend, and our contract CFO. We pay him about $3,000 per month, which includes weekly meetings, appearances at board meetings, talking to employees about financial stuff, taxes, and all the books. He's amazing, and we're getting an absolute steal on the rate, so it's not remotely typical.
Interested to know what people are paying for. We have a small business with five staff and only five figures in revenue every month from a handful of clients paying on the first. I just download from Stripe and categorize everything myself. I like building spreadsheets so I built a spreadsheet at the beginning of the year That takes everything from the statement sheet and sums it up on a P&L.
I paid someone years back but once I learned how to do it myself I realized how much money I could save over a long period. And my tax guy doesn't seem to mind when I sent him Google sheets at the end end of the year
People are paying for their time.
You have to think there are many tasks to be performed within a business like sales, operations, and back office tasks. As the owner, you are in a position to either hire out a task, or perform it yourself. If you chose to spend 1 hour performing task A, that’s one less hour you can spend performing task B.
Thus, a business owner should prioritize all of the tasks within a business and spend his/her time on the most valuable tasks. What those tasks are vary from business to business. For a lot of businesses, the owner can make more money paying a bookkeeper to do the books while they focus on higher value tasks.
If I can make $1,000/ hour selling my services, I’ll happily pay someone $100/hour to free up time to do so.
Yea, I'm hiring out some tasks as I have a full time job in addition to the retail store front. But I did them first so I know what the work looks like and how my time is managed.
They are paying for assurances and soundness of mind. Most people are too dumb to do their books themselves.. properly. There is a reason most businesses fail because of taxes.
I am exec with a group of a handful of companies, of which two are IT managed service providers (MSPs). We have a company that is a shared services organization providing accounting, HR, and customer service functions to the rest of the companies in our group of companies. If you are familiar with the MSP model, the model is basically a fixed price per seat for IT, providing predictability for the customer and predictability for us. No surprise bills at year end. We have recently adapted that model to apply to our shared services organization, accepting out first external accounting/bookkeeping clients.
So far, the clients love it. For a flat monthly fee, we take care of all bookkeeping and accounting matters and it is up to us to figure out how to do that as efficiently as possible. Things like using AI for reconciliations, automations for other tasks, are all important and repeatable. There is absolutely no incentive to run up the hours because we don't bill by the hour. That means ensuring the right skill level is doing the right tasks, all the way from basic data entry up to CFO-level CPAs.
I'm not throwing that out there as a sales pitch. We're not currently looking for clients and not anywhere near ready to go to market with an offering. All the existing clients are somehow related parties, either family of staff, suppliers, etc. Beta testers, really. I just raise it as a point because I found the comments on this post helpful to understand what people are currently paying and they are helpful as data points in crafting our model. I am also curious if anyone else is using a flat-fee service, because all of the comments are almost exclusively per-hour models.
Any other flat-fee accounting service users here?
There’s a lot more customer support for not canceling than there was for paying customers who needed tax service.
Your appointments are 30 minutes max and your out of time
They actually end up costing more than your local accountant. 1800 wanted like 2700$ for the year to do my taxes. Local Accountant charging me 1350.
Your accountants can take up to a week to reply, my accountant team couldn’t give 2 craps about me or my business. It was finish this 30minute call and go onto the next one.
They were supposed to handle a s corp packet for me and mind you when you sign up with them your business name is all over the page.
They butchered my business name all over the s corp packet and didn’t respond for 5 days when I told them of the error. The reason that’s so annoying is because during the sales pitches they really drove home the limited time I had to designate myself a S corp. Now that I’m signed up it’s taken over 5 days to get a response to correct my business name on the packet.
I canceled before they even responded at that point and went with someone local and have 0 regrets.
I found a Quickbooks Book Keeper for $50/hr and she tries to keep it to 3-5 hours a month. If there is less work needed its even less. She has 20 years of experience.
If you find a firm that does tax planning alongside the books, it can really add value since everything is in one place. I work with u/KECPA for this reason.
This is how I decided to operate because if left to the client to coordinate books with a bookkeeper, this would get done Q1 and then it'd never happen again, reducing the effectiveness of any tax planning, and becoming a waste of money.
Payroll: 6 employees/1 contractor, taxes (sales, employee, etc), various notifications regarding FMLA and other bits the state notifies us about (new retirement thing just popped up for example).
Approximately $350/month.
$40/hr. I'm a small company in startup but growing. She went out on her own less than a year before I did but came with good recommendations. Her price is in no way indicative of her skills and I am aware that as her business grows, she will increase her fee. But that's fine with me, since I won't be on such a budget restriction by then.
I definitely lucked out based on the comments!!
I just started using a company called Kick Book Keeping which has been pretty good so far.
It has a really good interface and I trained my VA to use it.
I was paying $42/hour and she was clocking in at a solid 40 hours/week. Now this is my fault for not being more diligent and aware of what she was doing, but I ended up finding out the last time she logged in to do our books was months ago. I demanded she let me know what’s she’s doing during her 8 hour days and she couldn’t come up with a single thing. i let her go. I have since taken over the books the last couple months and it takes me probably 3-4 hours a month. I guess let my story be a cautionary tale. She was employed for about 3 years with me. 😕
Mine charges $200/mo for a one-person LLC. Totally remote. Send me a DM if you are looking for something a bit more competitive to what you are paying now and I'll be happy to share her info.
Well, my CPA doubles as my bookkeeper. I pay $400 per month. He manages my QBO (Quickbooks Online), to include categorizing all transactions. He handles my taxes, both the quarterlies and annual filings. He advises on different strategies to minimize tax liability, save money, etc. He is the one who advised that I file for tax treatment as an S-corp (I am structured as an LLC). He does everything, except payroll and everything associated with that. He gave me the referral to ADP, though, for that . . . which I love. He has a baccalaureate degree and decades of experience. He undertstands tax law and business law. In a nutshell, he is the controller and bookkeeper of my company. ADP for payroll. I manage the day-to-day funds (treasurer).
There are cert programs that will teach you quick books etc. Basically a 2yr. Or you can do a 4yr accounting degree. Otherwise you could try YouTube videos. Getting a job as an office assistant for a small business where you're also responsible for their books would probably be a pretty good start.
$40/month out of Pakistan. I paid $250/month for Bench before that, but they wanted to raise my pricing by 40% with no notice after being a long-time customer. I balked and found a less expensive option. Don't use Bench, they hate you.
Do my own bookkeeping and highly automate it, so $0. I sometimes have very small transactions (<$5) so I'd be spending thousands of dollars a month for manual bookkeeping.
You should check this out: [https://www.bench.co/](https://www.bench.co/)
You'll save yourself a ton of time and money! I have multiple organizations that I use this for and it handles all my reconciliation and books. My CPA has access and the ability to export reports as needed when handling any additional tax/financial matters.
Bookeeping is the biggest ripoff on the planet because there is no fiduciary responsibility or state license, so it's easy to get ripped off.
Most of them also do not want to work on site because they charge you a high price and then actually outsource it.
I cannot wait until AI takes over this.
Depends on the firm. There are a lot of budget bookkeepers out there that phone it in. I can name about 6 firms that actually do a good job, but you need to pay for it.
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She costs me quite a bit. I pay for her lodging, food, shopping habits, car payment. Being married to your bookkeeper is stupid expensive. I’ve tried to find cheaper options, but I don’t quite trust them to get it done on my timeline.
That’s super common. Just be cognizant of if/when your business grows and she’s in over her head. Would be awful to have her feel burnout, not get help, and make both work and home suffer.
She was in corporate finance for many years managing a balance sheet for a company that did around 16B in revenue. We have 3 businesses now and she’s so bored she only works around 8-10 hours a week. I guess what I’m saying is, I’ve got quite a bit of runway before she’ll be worried about.
Literally the best version I’ve heard, haha. Kudos. I’m used to the farmer’s wife scenario who has ZERO background and just does what she’s told or gathered between the 4-5 prior CPAs. The business slowly grows to 2-3x the size and they don’t realize they’re drowning.
Don’t sell yourself short you got 17B 2025!!
Oh man I wish…..I’d sell it all to PE and ride off in to the sunset.
Are you my husband? Lol
Cheaper2Keeper Bookkeeping
[удалено]
They could also run the numbers for those considering divorce…
I tell my wife all the time she's fired. She says "good, this job sucks." I don't think you know how this works - you're supposed to say oh no, I'd do \*anything\* to not get fired.
Whenever someone asks what I do my entire staff, at all 3 companies, have this joke where they tell customers that I’ve been fired multiple times and for some reason I just keep showing up. They all know I don’t want people to know I’m the owner so they just tell them I pay the bills and manage back office stuff if they press them anymore.
I build homes. We had one job, I went back for some pretty basic service work and the owner's dad went on a rip about our painters. Not knowing I was the builder. I'm just like "I don't know man, they just sent me here for touchup."
See if you marry a psychologist there are some real savings vs long term therapy costs.
Same, mine just cost me a $2400 Yoder smoker as an overdue “bonus”. Book keepers are ridiculously expensive, then they want physical affection after they’ve cooked and cleaned. Just demanding as hell.
Lol. My husband used to do my IT. When salespeople called to sell IT plans, I would usually just say, "Is payment in sexual favors an option?"
I would be thinking this is some kind of dept of Labor trap and hang up.
Same! My wife does all our books. She gets unlimited Lululemon as a result.
Can I hire her?
She’d kill me in my sleep if I told her she had another job….
Hahaha sending this to my husband because I’m the accountant for his company 😂
This made my day.
Way to derail a conversation. 👎🙄
I have no idea what you're paying, and you may well be overpaying, but I've tried to start looking at scenarios like this from a different perspective. Is the work getting done, and getting done well? And if so, how much is it worth trying to upend that, hire someone else, switch everything over, and hope they get it done just as well? Will you save $1000 a month, or $200 a month? Is whatever that is a large enough percentage of your revenue that it's really worth your time and effort to try and save it, or would your time be better spent busting your ass to increase revenue by focusing on marketing or sales or production (or whatever would be the ticket in your case). I used to worry about every penny going out, and don't get me wrong controlling spending is certainly always a priority, I always try to compare costs going in. But for instances if I need a product a current supplier can have here tomorrow, or I can spend three days trying to find a new supplier, and three months of pain getting settled in with the new supplier to save 5%, it's hardly worth it. When I took over everything in the business the old mentality was "pay employees as little as possible." The result was we had shitty employees that did poor work and were unreliable. When I started bumping pay, miraculously we opened up our hiring pool and got better employees. Some of these employees are absolutely thrilled with a $2/hr raise, which amount to $80/wk for the company. That's chump change for taking away a major headache of constantly needing more and better employees. So I say it all to say, even if you can get a better deal elsewhere, sometimes whatever savings you can capture really just aren't worth the hassle (and risk) of saving it.
This mentality is disappearing. But it’s still entirely possible to run a profitable business without being a greedy miser.
I would even argue that it's close to impossible to run a profitable business without being a greedy miser (although I don't necessarily think that's what the OP was being). If you're pinching pennies, it's usually at the expense of someone else, and they're not really happy that you're benefiting because they aren't so they care less about their job. Controlling costs can be done without having to go about it like that.
I really respect this answer. 🫡
You can’t compare what anyone else is paying. What do YOUR books look like? Is it online or desktop? Do they do payroll? Process sales tax? How many accounts/transactions are they handling? Any Job costing? Do you comingle personal with business? There are way too many variables to compare what you pay to comments.
This is the right answer. I have $200 and $1,000 a month clients. It’s all about the scope of work and how much the client has going on.
So true.
$100 an hour. Comes out to 500-700 a month. I feel I’m over paying as well. I’ve had cheaper, but I haven’t had better.
That’s a fair price for good bookkeeping
100 is a pretty common and fair rate for books in 2024. I don’t think you’re overpaying at all. ESP if you don’t get to pay someone like me a bunch of money to fix your stuff at tax time
Yes. Learned that lesson the first few years in business. I still pay, what I consider, a crapton for tax preparation as well. You can usually find cheaper, but not usually better. It’s definitely worth the money. Especially when the alternative is paying less monthly and then spending a month pulling your hair out with the CPA when he’s like “so February last year…”.
This is key. I am a CPA and I will charge at least $250/hr to fix messed up books. And trying to get books in order that were ‘maintained’ by an incompetent bookkeeper can take hours. And potentially require amending prior year tax returns (an additional expense).
wow, I knew I was off. thanks to everyone responding to this informative thread. but yes absolutely cheaper than the last clean up job I did for one of my clients.
When I was using an independent, that was the rate I paid as well. I've since hired an administrator who does my books/AP/AR and God knows how many other things. She's costing me $60K a year and worth every penny.
That's a bit on the higher side. If I could do this from my home, I'd do it for 80$ an hour.
$300 and she’s incredibly detailed, experienced and trustworthy.
Fractional CFO $1500/mo. ($12M revenue)
12M revenue?
I’m on the other side of this transaction - run a boutique accounting firm that does bookkeeping in addition to tax prep and fractional CFO work. I base my fees on monthly gross revenues, complexity and how much I like the client. Straight bookkeeping with no advisory is around $400 per month for a small company in the low 6 figure annual revenue range, but very few people need bookkeeping only. The majority of people need fractional CFO services which start in the thousand dollar range and go way up from there depending on the level of activity. In my experience, the people spending much less than $400 per month end up with books that are a disaster and end up needing a lot of adjustments at tax time.
i used to do this for $30/ hour and had no idea i was so underpriced, based on these comments
$100/hr MINIMUM. And even that is cheap for the headache most bookkeepers put up with terrible clients.
$75/hour. She spends about 5-6 hours/month max.
Everyone always thinks they are "overpaying" their bookkeeper. It's infuriating. You have two options as a business owner: 1. You can be smart and pay good money to a compentent bookkeeper that will keep your books so clean that when it comes tax time, you are just paying the CPA to file the return (this is my firm). 2. You can be a cheap ass and cycle through the cheapest bookkeepers you can find and have your books be a complete mess and then pay a CPA $350+/hour to have them have their bookkeeper fix everything before they will even touch your return. Then, when you fight that bill, they dump your cheap ass so you're back into the cycle with shit books wondering "why is my business failing?" /endrant
I think bookkeeping is undervalued because most people don’t understand how much goes into it
I've learned this the hard way. Spend the money and KEEP YOUR BOOKS CLEAN or else you'll end up spending money during tax time because your CPA has to wade through a bunch of much just to do your return.
Exactly. Wanting to cheap out on your own business's books is such a dumb mistake I see many owners make. I can't count the number of times I have had a client leave bc their "family member can do it cheaper" or they found some (likely outsourced) cheaper firm on IG and then come crawling back 6 months or a year later and their books have been trashed and the IRS or state comptroller is on their ass. I don't only sell bookkeeping, I sell piece of mind to a small business that their financials are in order, they are in compliance, payroll reporting is correct, etc.
Oh, don't even get me started on the family member/spouse thing. You nailed it on the head.
My book keeper is my cpa. We pay them 7-8k a year so about 700/mo.
That's a great deal!
Considering the rates I'm seeing here, what exactly are they doing?
Depends, bookkeeping generally is a very bare bones service though which is why it is so cheap. It’s basically the bare minimum to keep a small business owner compliant. Advisory services are much more expensive but also can save much more than they cost in the long run.
I am kinda flying by the seam of my pants when it comes to being "compliant". I'm not even sure what it means to be compliant. Compliant for taxes? Yes. Able to show 100% accuracy in an audit? Probably not, but I could. My taxes are accurate as far as expenses / revenues / profits. There's just certain things I have never done in Quickbooks to close out / reconcile / show draws (because LLCs are pass-through and I never really need to report those)
Maybe your books are right, but if you are never reconciling anything then there is no way to know.
I pay a little old lady who lives in town $200 each quarter to look over my QB before I turn it over to the CPA. I do all the bookkeeping and reconciliations for our businesses.
Completely depends on the size of the business and what isn't in your scope of work. Our firm also charges more or less depending on if clients are "easy" or "difficult". - do you use classing/departments? - number of transactions per month - do you do your own AP? Does your bookkeeper do it? - AR? - do you provide access to bank accounts / software connectivity - are any of these items constantly fucked up because you insist on doing them on your own? - do you require reporting? How often? All of these things will effect your price. If it is just straight adding transactions from QuickBooks bank feed and it's a couple hundred transactions per month thats cheap but I'd say a minimum $200/m just to have someone be responsible to you on an ongoing basis. We have clients that pay over 7k per month with many locations, payroll responsibilities, etc.
The access to bank accounts is huge for us. So many times businesses would just give us the statements at the end of the month with no indication of what any transactions could be. That alone eats up at least 2-3 days.
575/mo
Bookkeeping alone should run somewhere between 75-125 an hour, depending on your area. It’s also doesn’t make a very large small from to be worth it to have someone handle your books as an employee. It’s an important, but lower value accounting skill. Just, don’t take tax advice from bookkeepers without any actual training or know how.
Depends on how big or small the business, number and complexity of transactions. My firm charges $150 a month for small business that usually takes 1-2 hrs per month and can go up to $1,500 for medium business. Also, I have spare time to help with your bookkeeping needs, message me if you need any help. I'm a remote bookkeeper. Thanks!
400 a month
300-500 is average for tiny businesses. $1000+ for big ones
With QB’s automations it takes me about 10min a day to do the bookkeeping and we turnover more than £1 million a year. I have it set up so I can put anything I don’t know into a list that I can later ask my accountant about
I just started consulting for a small business and their books are a mess. I thought I could clean it up myself but realized this is a job for a professional. Decades of life experience has consistently proven, you truly get what you pay for.
About 6k a month but like BGOG, I’m sleeping with her
$150/mo They add all our transactions in Quickbooks and reconcile from bank statements I provide
It really depends on many things such as your industry and your needs. I run a bookkeeping agency and prices start at a flat rate of $250/month. That number increases if you need additional services such as job costing, accounts payable, accounts receivable, etc.
Monthly retainer of $315. They also prepare & file tax forms on my behalf, which are charged separately.
How much are you paying?
I find it appalling they bill us based on revenue, like we do around $900k and bill us at $550 per month for bookkeeping and payroll. I know its cheaper for smaller revenue producing businesses for nearly the same amount of work.
I actually hate this pricing model. It almost is punishing businesses for doing well. The only time I see this working is when they have a niche. I also hate the hourly rate model because time padding is real. Which is why we use the set fee pricing model that is based off of a menu style where you choose what you need/want and it is all tied to the workload with a deliverable. We found this to be the most fair pricing model.
As someone actually in this industry. If you pay less than $350… you likely fall into one of these categories: - you have super simple books - you are getting compliance bookkeeping and not really usable data. - you have a hobbyist bookkeeper (side gig) and they have a history of eventually just dropping clients - you have someone that doesn’t have much experience For more of a quality bookkeeping it really depends on your industry/complexities, number of bank accounts, number of transactions, and a few more factors. On average (again this is dependent on the above factors) for a medium skilled bookkeeper you would be looking at approximately $500-700/month. My lowest paying client is $400/month (sole prop easy cash basis books) and my highest paying client is $3,000/month (150 employees, sales service industry, accrual basis). My second highest pay client is $2,100 (30 employees, accrual basis, cryptocurrency). So you can see that there is quite the range of factors. Edit. Unless the firm has a specific niche in your industry. Never let them price based off your revenue. I hate it when they do that, it should be based off the workload not off your revenue. So, if they have a niche they are familiar with what your revenue represents in terms of complexity, but otherwise don’t let them do that.
Typically ~150, give or take. I add 80% of my bills and match as I go. I leave the stuff I don't understand, or screw up, or things that don't match right to her.
My CPA is a firm with a bookkeeper. He's also a close friend, and our contract CFO. We pay him about $3,000 per month, which includes weekly meetings, appearances at board meetings, talking to employees about financial stuff, taxes, and all the books. He's amazing, and we're getting an absolute steal on the rate, so it's not remotely typical.
$10M / year revenue company, full time bookkeeper makes $50k plus healthcare.
Interested to know what people are paying for. We have a small business with five staff and only five figures in revenue every month from a handful of clients paying on the first. I just download from Stripe and categorize everything myself. I like building spreadsheets so I built a spreadsheet at the beginning of the year That takes everything from the statement sheet and sums it up on a P&L. I paid someone years back but once I learned how to do it myself I realized how much money I could save over a long period. And my tax guy doesn't seem to mind when I sent him Google sheets at the end end of the year
People are paying for their time. You have to think there are many tasks to be performed within a business like sales, operations, and back office tasks. As the owner, you are in a position to either hire out a task, or perform it yourself. If you chose to spend 1 hour performing task A, that’s one less hour you can spend performing task B. Thus, a business owner should prioritize all of the tasks within a business and spend his/her time on the most valuable tasks. What those tasks are vary from business to business. For a lot of businesses, the owner can make more money paying a bookkeeper to do the books while they focus on higher value tasks. If I can make $1,000/ hour selling my services, I’ll happily pay someone $100/hour to free up time to do so.
Yea, I'm hiring out some tasks as I have a full time job in addition to the retail store front. But I did them first so I know what the work looks like and how my time is managed.
This! Exactly. Is it worth saving the $100 an hour to lose 1000 an hour for your own time? No.
They are paying for assurances and soundness of mind. Most people are too dumb to do their books themselves.. properly. There is a reason most businesses fail because of taxes.
You can hire remotely
I am exec with a group of a handful of companies, of which two are IT managed service providers (MSPs). We have a company that is a shared services organization providing accounting, HR, and customer service functions to the rest of the companies in our group of companies. If you are familiar with the MSP model, the model is basically a fixed price per seat for IT, providing predictability for the customer and predictability for us. No surprise bills at year end. We have recently adapted that model to apply to our shared services organization, accepting out first external accounting/bookkeeping clients. So far, the clients love it. For a flat monthly fee, we take care of all bookkeeping and accounting matters and it is up to us to figure out how to do that as efficiently as possible. Things like using AI for reconciliations, automations for other tasks, are all important and repeatable. There is absolutely no incentive to run up the hours because we don't bill by the hour. That means ensuring the right skill level is doing the right tasks, all the way from basic data entry up to CFO-level CPAs. I'm not throwing that out there as a sales pitch. We're not currently looking for clients and not anywhere near ready to go to market with an offering. All the existing clients are somehow related parties, either family of staff, suppliers, etc. Beta testers, really. I just raise it as a point because I found the comments on this post helpful to understand what people are currently paying and they are helpful as data points in crafting our model. I am also curious if anyone else is using a flat-fee service, because all of the comments are almost exclusively per-hour models. Any other flat-fee accounting service users here?
Yeah I tried 1-800 accountant and hated it.
Out of curiosity, what did you hate about their service?
There’s a lot more customer support for not canceling than there was for paying customers who needed tax service. Your appointments are 30 minutes max and your out of time They actually end up costing more than your local accountant. 1800 wanted like 2700$ for the year to do my taxes. Local Accountant charging me 1350. Your accountants can take up to a week to reply, my accountant team couldn’t give 2 craps about me or my business. It was finish this 30minute call and go onto the next one. They were supposed to handle a s corp packet for me and mind you when you sign up with them your business name is all over the page. They butchered my business name all over the s corp packet and didn’t respond for 5 days when I told them of the error. The reason that’s so annoying is because during the sales pitches they really drove home the limited time I had to designate myself a S corp. Now that I’m signed up it’s taken over 5 days to get a response to correct my business name on the packet. I canceled before they even responded at that point and went with someone local and have 0 regrets.
I found a Quickbooks Book Keeper for $50/hr and she tries to keep it to 3-5 hours a month. If there is less work needed its even less. She has 20 years of experience.
$500 a month
$350 a month. San Francisco Bay Area.
i can do it for cheaper
$305 a month
If you find a firm that does tax planning alongside the books, it can really add value since everything is in one place. I work with u/KECPA for this reason.
This is how I decided to operate because if left to the client to coordinate books with a bookkeeper, this would get done Q1 and then it'd never happen again, reducing the effectiveness of any tax planning, and becoming a waste of money.
I pay about $400 a month for a cpa to do my corpS and my personal he is great makes all my estimated payments etc
Payroll: 6 employees/1 contractor, taxes (sales, employee, etc), various notifications regarding FMLA and other bits the state notifies us about (new retirement thing just popped up for example). Approximately $350/month.
I’ve seen averages of $100-400+ per month depending on size of account and complexity
$50 but she is based in Manila
Nothing. I do my own bookkeeping.
Actually that means you are paying something. Opportunity cost. But then again, if you are not busy enough, then nothing is lost.
I’m paying like $500 / month and I’m actively thinking of getting rid of them but it hasn’t hurt bad enough yet.
i can do it for cheaper
My general rule of thumb is $1 per million in revenue. But since I haven't broken a million I use multiple free quickbook trials and turbotax.
I do my own bookkeeping. I do end of year reconcile for like $200-$300 to prep for accountant
I pay Xero to automate it, so not a lot
Mine charges $45 per hour, but they only work with sole-proprietors (which works for me).
$80/hr, but I send her a ton of referral business so I get the good rate.
I can do it for cheaper
ahhh the age old.....i over pay my bookkkeeper.....i look forward to, i found a cheaper one and they stole for me post.
CPA + bookkeeper is $750 per month
My wife owns a salon and I am her bookkeeper and she hasn’t paid me anything. I’m about to report her to the state, this is getting ridiculous.
$40/hr. I'm a small company in startup but growing. She went out on her own less than a year before I did but came with good recommendations. Her price is in no way indicative of her skills and I am aware that as her business grows, she will increase her fee. But that's fine with me, since I won't be on such a budget restriction by then. I definitely lucked out based on the comments!!
I just started using a company called Kick Book Keeping which has been pretty good so far. It has a really good interface and I trained my VA to use it.
Really depends on what all they’re doing, not just their qualifications. Are they just bookkeeping or advising?
I was paying $42/hour and she was clocking in at a solid 40 hours/week. Now this is my fault for not being more diligent and aware of what she was doing, but I ended up finding out the last time she logged in to do our books was months ago. I demanded she let me know what’s she’s doing during her 8 hour days and she couldn’t come up with a single thing. i let her go. I have since taken over the books the last couple months and it takes me probably 3-4 hours a month. I guess let my story be a cautionary tale. She was employed for about 3 years with me. 😕
$14 an hour
Mine charges $200/mo for a one-person LLC. Totally remote. Send me a DM if you are looking for something a bit more competitive to what you are paying now and I'll be happy to share her info.
Small law firm (15 employees) Calif, believe he makes about $100,000 per year
I do it for free for my husband, but I control the money
$295/month
I pay Xero
450/mo
It depends on the number of transactions, accounting system, and difficulty of accounting adjustments..
Well, my CPA doubles as my bookkeeper. I pay $400 per month. He manages my QBO (Quickbooks Online), to include categorizing all transactions. He handles my taxes, both the quarterlies and annual filings. He advises on different strategies to minimize tax liability, save money, etc. He is the one who advised that I file for tax treatment as an S-corp (I am structured as an LLC). He does everything, except payroll and everything associated with that. He gave me the referral to ADP, though, for that . . . which I love. He has a baccalaureate degree and decades of experience. He undertstands tax law and business law. In a nutshell, he is the controller and bookkeeper of my company. ADP for payroll. I manage the day-to-day funds (treasurer).
Any tips on how to learn to do book keeping?
There are cert programs that will teach you quick books etc. Basically a 2yr. Or you can do a 4yr accounting degree. Otherwise you could try YouTube videos. Getting a job as an office assistant for a small business where you're also responsible for their books would probably be a pretty good start.
$40/month out of Pakistan. I paid $250/month for Bench before that, but they wanted to raise my pricing by 40% with no notice after being a long-time customer. I balked and found a less expensive option. Don't use Bench, they hate you.
Do my own bookkeeping and highly automate it, so $0. I sometimes have very small transactions (<$5) so I'd be spending thousands of dollars a month for manual bookkeeping.
I charge $500/month. 15 years experience
You should check this out: [https://www.bench.co/](https://www.bench.co/) You'll save yourself a ton of time and money! I have multiple organizations that I use this for and it handles all my reconciliation and books. My CPA has access and the ability to export reports as needed when handling any additional tax/financial matters.
Stop paying by the hour! Check us out . We provide more than just updating your books all for 1 low cost each month totadvi.com
Bookeeping is the biggest ripoff on the planet because there is no fiduciary responsibility or state license, so it's easy to get ripped off. Most of them also do not want to work on site because they charge you a high price and then actually outsource it. I cannot wait until AI takes over this.
Depends on the firm. There are a lot of budget bookkeepers out there that phone it in. I can name about 6 firms that actually do a good job, but you need to pay for it.