Most bookkeeping quotes are priced off revenue, which is convenient for the provider and wrong for you. A $500,000 e-commerce business with four thousand transactions a month is more work than a $5m consultancy with forty invoices. Revenue is a proxy for nothing here.
The market range
Outsourced bookkeeping for a small US company generally runs $500 to $2,000 a month. Below that you are usually buying software with a light review. Above it you are usually buying a controller layer that has not been named as one.
Ours starts at $350 a month and scales with volume and entity count rather than turnover.
| Monthly | Roughly | Typically includes |
|---|---|---|
| $350 to $600 | Under 200 transactions, one entity, one currency | Capture, coding, bank and card reconciliation, monthly close |
| $600 to $1,200 | 200 to 800 transactions, AP and AR runs | The above plus payables, receivables and payroll support |
| $1,200 to $2,000 | 800+ transactions, or multi-entity, or inventory | The above plus consolidation, intercompany, stock movements |
| Above $2,000 | Usually includes review and judgement | Ask whether you are buying a controller |
What actually drives the price
- Transaction count. The honest primary driver. Ask any provider to quote off this and see whether they can.
- Number of accounts to reconcile. Six bank accounts, 3 cards and two payment processors is 6 times the reconciliation of one bank account.
- Entities and currencies. Each additional entity is a full close, priced as one.
- Inventory or work in progress. Valuation and cut-off move this from capture into judgement.
- How far behind you are. Catch-up work is a separate one-off, and it should be quoted separately rather than smeared into the monthly fee.
If nobody asked how many transactions you run a month, the quote was a guess with a decimal point.
What a cheap provider leaves out
The savings come from the same 3 places every time:
- The close date. Cheap providers reconcile whenever. If your accounts land on day 25, they inform nothing, because the month they describe is nearly over. We close by day 8.
- Anyone reviewing the coding. Consistent miscoding is invisible in a single month and painful across a year, because every trend line is drawn through it.
- Accruals and prepayments. Pure cash-basis capture is cheaper and produces a P&L that lurches whenever an annual invoice lands.
None of these show up in month one. All of them show up at year end, or the first time somebody outside the business reads the numbers.
Where bookkeeping stops and something else begins
A bookkeeper answers whether it was recorded. A controller answers whether it is right. If you are asking your bookkeeper about revenue recognition policy or the treatment of a multi-year contract, you have outgrown the seat and should price the next one deliberately rather than paying bookkeeping rates for judgement.
4 questions to ask any provider
- What day of the month are my accounts final, and what happens if you miss it?
- Who reviews the coding, and how often?
- Is this cash basis or accrual, and what does the other one cost?
- What is the catch-up fee, quoted separately from the monthly?
One check on your current provider
Pull your last three monthly P&Ls and look at your largest recurring expense line. If it moves materially in one month with no explanation, either the coding is inconsistent or an annual cost was expensed in the month it was paid. Both are fixable. Neither will fix itself.