Outsourced Bookkeeping
Outsourced bookkeeping is four repetitive jobs on a monthly cycle. Meinry does those four and asks you about the rest.
What it refuses to do
It will not guess when the answer is not in the data
“$9,000 to Chase ••4471. No matching deposit in a connected account. Owner draw, or a transfer between your own accounts?”
It will not force a reconciliation to zero
“August is out by $412.60 against the statement. Closed with one break outstanding, on Operating.”
It will not quote an accuracy figure it has not measured
“No published categorisation rate yet. The exception queue is the number that matters, and it is on your screen.”
On this page6 sections
What Meinry costs
| Rung | Covers | A month |
|---|---|---|
| Ledger | Up to $25,000 a month in expenses, one set of books | $149 |
| Close (most businesses) | Up to $150,000 a month in expenses, one set of books | $390 |
| Controller | Up to $500,000 a month in expenses, up to 3 sets of books | $790 |
Banded on what the business spends each month, never on how many people log in. Above $500,000 a month, or more than three entities, the price is worked out with you. Meinry is opening to a first group of businesses. Joining puts you on that list at these prices. There is nothing to pay today, and no card is asked for.
Join the first group or read the full ladder and what each rung includes.
Outsourced bookkeeping and outsourced accounting are not the same purchase
The two phrases are used interchangeably by the firms selling them and they describe different scopes at different prices, which is the first thing to pin down when you compare quotes.
Outsourced bookkeeping services cover the monthly record: coding every transaction, reconciling every account against its statement, and issuing a profit and loss and a balance sheet. It is a defined, repeating job with a defined output.
Outsourced accounting adds interpretation and, usually, a qualified person. Management reporting, budgeting and forecasting, advice on structure, the annual filing, and in the larger packages a fractional controller or chief financial officer reviewing the numbers rather than producing them. It costs a multiple of the bookkeeping, and it is a genuinely different thing to buy.
The confusion is expensive in one specific direction. A firm quoting an accounting package to a business that needed bookkeeping sells a controller's review of a record nobody is maintaining well, which is the most expensive way to have inaccurate books. If your question is who codes the transactions and reconciles the bank, you want the bookkeeping scope, and you should say so in those words.
So the decision to outsource bookkeeping is narrower than it sounds, and it is narrower still for a small business. Outsourced bookkeeping for small business owners is not a decision about whether to have a finance function. It is a decision about who performs four repeating jobs, and whether that has to be a person at all.
- Bookkeeping: coding, reconciliation, exceptions, monthly statements
- Accounting: the above plus interpretation, planning, filings and review
- Ask which one a quote covers before comparing it to another one
What you are actually buying when you outsource
Strip the packaging off any outsourced bookkeeping engagement and there are four jobs underneath it. Every transaction that hits your bank or card gets a category. Every account gets reconciled against its statement, so the books agree with reality rather than with the feed. Anything that does not fit gets asked about. Then a profit and loss, a balance sheet and a cash flow statement come out at the end of the month.
That is the whole product. It is not unskilled work, but it is repetitive work with a right answer, and the firm charges you for the hours it takes a person to reach it. Which is why the price of outsourced bookkeeping has almost nothing to do with how complicated your business is, and almost everything to do with how many transactions you generate.
- Categorisation: every bank and card transaction assigned to an account in your chart of accounts
- Reconciliation: the ledger checked against the statement until the two agree to the cent
- Exceptions: the transactions that do not fit a rule, raised as questions rather than guessed at
- Reporting: profit and loss, balance sheet and cash flow, produced on a fixed date each month
Why the price sits where it sits
The market splits cleanly at the headcount line, and it is visible in the published ladders. Read from vendor pricing pages on 30 August 2026: software with nobody behind it tops out around $250 to $360 a month, with Digits Pro at $250 and Puzzle's top self-serve rung at $360. The moment a person is attached to the account, entry pricing jumps and does not come back down. Bench lists $399 monthly, Xendoo $395, Fondo $399, Zeni $549.
Nothing unstaffed sells above $360. Nothing fully staffed starts below $395. That gap is not an accident of the market. It is the cost of a person, and it is the only thing you are buying when you cross it.
This category repriced during 2026 and will again, so check any of these before you commit. The pattern is the durable part, not the individual numbers.
- Software only, no bookkeepers on staff: $0 to $360 a month
- Staffed service with software on top: $299 to $2,500 and beyond
- The difference between the two bands is one person's time, not one feature
What changes when the bookkeeper is software
Two things get better and one thing gets worse, and it is worth being straight about all three.
It runs continuously rather than monthly. A firm touches your books once a month because that is how a person's calendar works, so a miscoded transaction surfaces three weeks after it happened, when you have stopped being able to remember it. Meinry categorises as the transaction lands, which means the books are current on the fourteenth and not only on the first.
It costs a fraction of the price, because running a model over a thousand transactions is not the same cost as a person running over a thousand transactions. That is the entire reason the price can sit below the staffed floor without the work being smaller.
And the part that gets worse: nobody is going to phone your vendor for you. A bookkeeper absorbs the ambiguous cases by making a judgement call and telling you afterwards. Meinry surfaces them and asks. If you will not spend a few minutes a month answering questions about your own business, you want the person, and you should pay for them.
What only you can answer
No system can tell whether a $9,000 payment was a contractor invoice, an equipment purchase or money you moved to yourself, when the bank line carries only a counterparty and an amount. That is not a limitation of this generation of software. The fact lives with you and nowhere else.
So the only question worth asking about any product in this category is what it does at that moment. It can guess, produce a clean-looking ledger and be wrong in a way nothing surfaces. Or it can ask, and cost you a few minutes. Meinry asks, and the transaction stays an exception until you answer rather than becoming a confident wrong number in your profit and loss.
The same rule governs reconciliation. A break that cannot be explained stays visible on the account it belongs to, with both sides of the difference and the date it appeared. A month closes with breaks outstanding if that is the truth, and the report says so, because a reconciliation forced to zero with a plug entry destroys the whole point of the control.
Who this is a bad fit for
If you need someone to represent you in an audit, chase your customers for payment, or run payroll compliance across several states, that is a different job with a different price and this is not it. If you want a fractional CFO in board meetings, same answer. In all of those cases you are buying judgement and professional responsibility, and both are worth paying for.
The fit is a business generating a few hundred to a few thousand transactions a month, with a chart of accounts that does not change every quarter, that wants the monthly cycle to happen without either hiring or remembering.
Questions people actually ask
How much does outsourced bookkeeping cost?
Between $500 and $3,000 a month for a staffed firm, banded on monthly expense volume rather than on hours. Read from published ladders on 30 August 2026, entry pricing for a staffed service runs $299 to $549. Meinry's three bands are in the table above and none of them has a person attached.
Is outsourced bookkeeping worth it?
It is worth it against doing it yourself badly, which is the real comparison. The question is whether you are buying the work or buying a person. If the work is what you need, software does it for a fraction of the price and does it continuously rather than once a month.
Do I still need an accountant?
For the annual return and for tax planning, yes, and you should keep them. Bookkeeping is the monthly record; the accountant files from it. Clean books make that engagement cheaper, because much of what a tax accountant bills for is fixing the record before they can use it.
What happens to my existing books?
They come across. The history is read from your bank feed as well as your existing ledger, because the ledger is often the thing that is wrong. If the past months need correcting, that is a cleanup, which is scoped by transaction volume rather than by how many months are involved.
Is it accrual basis or cash basis?
Cash basis on the free tier and accrual from the paid tiers upward. Cash-only pricing is cheap because it skips the harder half of the work, and if you bill in advance, carry inventory or pay annually for something you use monthly, it will give you the wrong number.
Run this against your own books
Connect the accounts and it codes what has already landed, matches the receipts to it, and reconciles each account against its own statement. What it cannot resolve from the data comes back to you as a question rather than a category, and the month closes when those are answered.
Close your month without hiring anybody
Every transaction coded as it lands, every account reconciled against its own statement, and a month that closes and locks on a fixed date. Priced on what your business spends, never on how many people log in.
One company, coded and reconciled
- Expenses a month
- Up to $25,000 a month
- Sets of books
- 1
- Accounts connected
- 3
The month closes and locks
- Expenses a month
- Up to $150,000 a month
- Sets of books
- 1
- Accounts connected
- 10
Several entities, consolidated
- Expenses a month
- Up to $500,000 a month
- Sets of books
- 3
- Accounts connected
- Uncapped
Meinry is opening to a first group of businesses. Joining puts you on that list at these prices. There is nothing to pay today, and no card is asked for.
Above $500,000 a month, or more than three entities, the price is worked out with you.