How much bookkeeping costs

The reason two quotes for the same business can be twice as far apart as you expect is that they are usually not quoting the same thing. Before comparing numbers, work out which of four models each one is.

An hourly bookkeeper charges for time and gives you back whatever fits in it. A monthly package charges a fixed fee for a defined scope, which is where most online services sit and where published bookkeeping prices usually come from. A per-transaction price scales with volume and is common in high-throughput retail. And accounting software is a licence to do the work yourself, which is a different purchase entirely, however often the two get compared on the same page.

The trap is comparing an hourly rate against a monthly package. An hourly rate tells you what an hour costs and nothing about how many you will need, and the number of hours is the entire question. A package tells you the total and hides the rate, which is fine until the scope moves.

At $50 to $100 an hour, a business with one bank account, a card and a few hundred transactions a month is buying somewhere between four and eight hours of attention. That is $200 to $600 a month, and it is the bookkeeping cost for small business owners that most sole traders and small partnerships actually pay. The average cost of bookkeeping services sits inside that band for anything under a few hundred transactions.

The hours are not evenly spread, which is the part that surprises people. Most of them land in the week after the month ends, because that is when the statement arrives and the reconciliation can be done at all. A bookkeeper with fifteen clients has fifteen month ends in the same week, which is why the close on a small account often arrives three or four weeks after the period it describes.

The rate also does not include the thing you probably want. Advice on how the business is doing, a conversation about whether a cost is worth carrying, a view on cash next quarter: those are the accountant's hours, and they are billed at two to four times the bookkeeping rate. A bookkeeper produces the record. Somebody else reads it.

Almost nobody sets bookkeeping services pricing on the size of the business. They set it on the amount of work the business generates, and those are different numbers. A consultancy billing $2 million a year on twelve invoices is cheaper to keep books for than a coffee shop turning over $400,000 across nine thousand card transactions.

Six things move a quote, in roughly this order of weight.

Read across the category and the prices do not form a smooth curve. They form two clusters with a gap in the middle, and the gap falls exactly where the staff start. Vendor pricing pages read on 30 August 2026.

Software that files nothing and decides nothing runs from about $20 a month to around $80. Software that does the categorising and the reconciling, with nobody attached, tops out at roughly $250 to $360 a month. The moment a human bookkeeper is assigned to the account, the entry price is $299 to $549, and a service with a qualified accountant on it runs from $500 into the low thousands.

Nothing unstaffed currently sells above about $360, and nothing staffed starts below about $299. That is not a coincidence and it is not a pricing convention. It is the cost of the person, showing up in the price, because a person can only keep so many sets of books.

It also tells you what you are choosing between. The question is rarely which vendor is cheapest. It is whether the work needs a person at all, and for a business with ordinary transaction patterns and no unusual treatment, increasingly it does not.

There are three ways a low monthly price stops being low, and all three are ordinary rather than dishonest. Knowing them is most of what it takes to read a quote properly.

The first is cash basis. An entry tier priced on cash accounting is cheaper because it genuinely does less work: no prepayments, no accruals, no deferred revenue. If you bill in advance, hold stock, or pay annually for something you consume monthly, cash basis will give you a wrong picture all year and a correction at the end of it. The upgrade to accrual is usually the largest single step in any provider's ladder.

The second is the exception. Every provider has transactions they cannot resolve without asking you. A cheap service handles them by choosing something plausible, which produces a clean report and an error nobody will find until it matters. That saving is real and it is borrowed against a future cleanup.

The third is the close. A service that categorises but never formally closes a period is selling data entry. Without a close and a lock, a figure you reported in April can be different when you look in June, because somebody recategorised something in May. The price of finding out which version was right is usually larger than the difference between the two quotes.

So the comparison that matters is not price against price. It is price against scope, and the four questions that settle it are whether accrual is included, what happens to an unresolved transaction, whether the period is closed and locked, and what the catch-up costs.

Do the arithmetic on your own hours rather than on the fee, because the fee is not what you are trading.

Count how long you spend on the books in a normal month, including the part at the end where you find the thing that does not tie. For most owners doing it themselves it is four to ten hours. Then value those hours at what you would otherwise earn or delegate them for, not at what you would pay a bookkeeper. If the business is worth anything per hour of your attention, that comparison usually settles it before the monthly fee is mentioned.

The second half of the calculation is the part nobody counts. Books that are late are more expensive than books that are wrong, because a wrong entry gets corrected and a late one accumulates. The bill for a year of deferred bookkeeping is a catch-up, and it arrives at a moment you did not choose, usually with a filing deadline attached.

There is a case for doing it yourself, and it is a narrow one: very low transaction volume, cash basis, one account, and a genuine willingness to do it every month rather than every quarter. Outside that, the question is not whether to pay for bookkeeping but which of the delivery models to pay for.

A monthly price covers the months from here on. It does not cover the ones behind you, and if you are behind, that is the larger of the two invoices in your first year.

Catch-up work is almost always billed hourly, scoped after somebody has looked, and the total tracks the number of transactions in the missing periods rather than the number of months. This is why a quote for "two years behind" is meaningless until the transactions have been counted, and why the same phrase can mean $900 for one business and $9,000 for another.

Ask for it as a separate line before you sign anything monthly. A service that will not scope the backlog until you have subscribed has arranged its pricing so that the number you compared was never the number you pay.

Meinry is priced on monthly expense volume, in three bands, with the figures in the table above. There is no hourly rate underneath it, no scoping call before you can see a price, and no per-seat charge, because a login costs nothing to serve while a transaction costs a model call.

The reason the price can be fixed is that nobody is assigned to your account. Every other fixed price in this category is a bet by the vendor about how many hours a person will need on your books, which is why it comes with a scope, a review and a clause about complexity. Ours is banded on the one number that actually drives the work.

What it does not do is worth being just as clear about. It will not guess when the data cannot answer, so transfers between your own accounts, payments to people and one-off charges with no history come back to you as questions. It will not force a reconciliation to zero, so a month that is out by an amount closes with the break named rather than hidden. And it does not quote an accuracy rate, because that has not been measured on real bank data yet. When it has, the figure and what it was measured on will both be published.

Most of the difference between two bookkeeping quotes disappears when you make both sides answer the same six questions. Ask them in writing and the cheaper one is often the more expensive one.