Services
Monthly bookkeeping run entirely in Xero — closed, reviewed and proven every period by the team that does the work.
Bookkeeping packages
The range
What the Market Charges
Published pricing guides converge on a band of roughly $200 to $2,000 a month for a US small business, with the figure tracking transaction volume, how many accounts need reconciling, and what is included. Intuit’s own guide puts typical flat monthly subscriptions at $300 to $1,500.
That band covers three different products, which is most of the reason it looks so wide.
| Tier | Typical monthly | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Categorisation and reconciliation | $200 to $500 | Transactions coded, bank feeds reconciled. Often no formal close, no reporting pack, no named reviewer. |
| Full-charge bookkeeping | $500 to $2,000 | The whole cycle: payables and receivables, accrual basis, a monthly close, statements you can act on. |
| With controller oversight | $2,000 to $5,000 | The above plus review, process ownership, board or lender reporting. |
The midpoint most small businesses actually land on for full-charge service on a clean file sits nearer $400 to $600 a month. The upper half of the band belongs to businesses with real volume, several entities, or complexity like inventory or trust accounting.
Treat every published range, including this one, as indicative. Nobody can quote your business from a table, and any provider who does is guessing at a number they will revise later.
The variables
The Four Things That Move a Quote
Revenue is the number most owners expect to matter, and it is the weakest predictor of the four. A consultancy turning over $2 million with forty transactions a month is cheaper to keep than a cafe turning over $600,000 with two thousand.
- Transaction volume. The single largest driver. Fifty a month and five hundred a month are different jobs, and every provider prices on some version of this whether they say so or not.
- Account count. Every bank account, credit card, loan and payment processor is another reconciliation and another place a difference can hide. Four accounts is not twice the work of two, but it is not the same either.
- Entity count. Each entity is a separate set of books. Intercompany balances that have to clear add work a single-entity business never has.
- Structural complexity. Inventory, deferred revenue, restricted funds, job costing, trust accounting, multi-channel sales, foreign currency. Any one of these changes what a close involves.
A provider who asks about all four before quoting is sizing the work. One who asks only for revenue is applying a formula, and formulas get revised in month four.
How it is billed
Fixed Fee or Hourly
Most reputable outsourced bookkeeping in 2026 is priced as a fixed monthly fee rather than hourly, and the reason is incentives.
An hourly bookkeeper earns more when the work takes longer. A fixed-fee firm earns more by being efficient, which is the same thing you want. You also cannot budget against an hourly rate multiplied by an unknown, and most billing disputes in this market happen precisely there.
Hourly still makes sense for genuinely unpredictable work: a clean-up where nobody yet knows how bad the file is, or a one-off project. For the monthly cycle, which is the same work every month by design, a fixed fee is the honest structure.
The question to ask about a fixed fee
What happens when volume grows. A fixed fee with no stated review point either gets renegotiated awkwardly later or quietly stops covering the work. Ask when the fee gets looked at and on what basis, before you sign rather than after.
The real total
What Sits Outside the Monthly Fee
This is where the ten-to-one spread mostly comes from. Two providers quote $400 and $900, and the difference is not service quality. It is what each one counts as included.
Commonly quoted separately:
- Onboarding and opening balances. Setting up the file, verifying what you are starting from, connecting integrations. Frequently a one-time project fee rather than part of month one.
- Catch-up and clean-up. If the books are behind, almost always separate. See the next section.
- Payroll. Sometimes bundled, often a per-run charge, sometimes not offered at all.
- Tax preparation and filing. Usually a separate engagement, often a separate firm.
- Accounts payable and receivable management. Recording them is normally included. Running the cycle, chasing, approving, preparing payment runs, is frequently an add-on.
- Bespoke reporting. Standard statements are included. Anything built to your own definitions usually is not.
- Software subscriptions. Your accounting platform, document capture, any connected apps. Some providers bundle, most do not.
- Transaction volume overages. A tier sized at 50 transactions behaves differently at 300.
One industry guide estimates that by twelve months in, the total a business pays is often 40 to 80 percent higher than the advertised entry price once add-ons and overages are counted. Whether that figure holds for any particular provider, the shape of the problem is real and it is the reason comparing headline rates tells you very little.
The part people forget
The Catch-Up Problem
If your books are behind, the clean-up frequently costs more than several months of ongoing service. That is not a markup. Untangling a year of miscoded transactions, duplicates and unreconciled accounts is genuinely harder than keeping a clean file current.
The comparison people find useful: an emergency plumber costs more than a maintenance visit, for the same reason. Working forward you know what you are looking at. Working backward you are reconstructing intent from bank lines, often with the context gone and the person who could explain it no longer there.
Two things follow, and they change how you should read a quote.
- A monthly quote given before anyone has seen your file is provisional. The provider is pricing a clean file. If yours is not clean, that number changes, and you want to find out in week two rather than month four.
- Remediation should be priced on its own. When clean-up is folded into a monthly fee, the monthly work suffers while the backlog is worked, and neither job finishes properly.
Ask any provider how they price catch-up and when they will tell you what yours will cost. A firm that has a clear answer has done it before. A firm that waves it away will send an invoice about it later.
The practical bit
How to Compare Two Quotes
Seven questions. Ask both providers the same ones and the difference between $400 and $900 usually explains itself.
- What volume is this priced for, and what happens above it? Get the number and the overage treatment.
- Is the month closed, or just coded? A closed month means control accounts agreed, accruals posted, the period locked. Coding is not closing.
- What do I receive each month, and by which working day? A date makes it a commitment rather than an intention.
- Who reviews the work, and is it the person who did it? Review by a second person is the difference between a firm and an individual.
- What is excluded? Ask for the list, not a reassurance. Compare the lists rather than the prices.
- How do you price catch-up, and when will I know what mine costs?
- Who can move money? The answer should be nobody at the provider. If a firm offers to hold that for your convenience, the convenience is the problem.
The two that separate providers fastest are closing versus coding, and the exclusion list. A cheap quote that codes transactions and calls it bookkeeping is not competing with a full-charge engagement; it is a different product at a fair price for what it is.
For comparison
What We Charge
Published, so you can hold it against anything else you are looking at.
| Service | Price |
|---|---|
| Monthly | From $399 a month. One entity, around fifty transactions a month, closed monthly. |
| Weekly | From $599 a month. Same scope, reconciled weekly rather than at month end. |
| Onboarding & prior bookkeeping | From $2,500, one-time. Opening balances verified, prior work cleaned up, integrations connected. |
| Receivables or payables management | From $100 a month each, alongside a bookkeeping package rather than on their own. |
| 32-point health check | $750 flat, credited in full against onboarding if you engage us within sixty days. |
Against the market bands above, $399 sits at the lower edge of full-charge pricing and below the $400 to $600 midpoint. That is a function of where the work is done rather than what is left out. Delivery is in Indonesia, engagement management is in San Jose, and the scope is the full cycle including a closed month.
What is excluded, stated plainly: tax preparation and filing, payroll, audit or attestation, and chasing your customers. Your accounting software subscription is billed in your name and paid by you.
Questions
Commonly Asked
How much do bookkeeping services cost per month?
Published 2026 guides put the range for a US small business at roughly $200 to $2,000 a month, with Intuit's own guide citing $300 to $1,500 for typical flat monthly subscriptions. Within that, basic categorisation and reconciliation runs $200 to $500, full-charge bookkeeping $500 to $2,000, and controller-level service $2,000 to $5,000. The midpoint most small businesses land on for full-charge service on a clean file is nearer $400 to $600. The figure depends on transaction volume, how many accounts need reconciling, entity count and structural complexity.
Why do bookkeeping quotes vary so much?
Mostly scope rather than quality. Providers differ on whether the month is actually closed or only coded, whether payables and receivables are managed or just recorded, whether onboarding and catch-up are included, and how volume overages are handled. Comparing headline rates without comparing exclusion lists tells you very little.
Is bookkeeping usually billed hourly or as a fixed fee?
Most reputable outsourced bookkeeping is now fixed monthly. Hourly billing misaligns incentives, since the provider earns more when the work takes longer, and it makes budgeting impossible. Hourly still suits genuinely unpredictable work such as a clean-up of unknown depth, but the recurring monthly cycle is better priced as a fixed fee.
How much does catch-up bookkeeping cost?
It is priced separately from monthly service and frequently costs more than several months of ongoing work, because reconstructing a backlog is harder than keeping a clean file current. The honest answer for any specific business depends on how many months are behind, how many accounts are involved, and whether the existing records are reconcilable or need rebuilding. Ask for it to be quoted on its own before it starts.
Is outsourcing cheaper than hiring a bookkeeper?
For most businesses under roughly $5 million in revenue, yes. The median bookkeeper salary reached $49,920 in 2024, which is before payroll taxes, benefits, software and cover for holidays. Equivalent outsourced service typically costs a fraction of that. Outsourcing also gives you continuity when one person is unavailable, which a single hire structurally cannot.
What should be included in a monthly bookkeeping fee?
At minimum: transactions coded, every bank and card account reconciled to a statement, payables and receivables recorded, accruals and prepayments posted, the period closed and locked, and a reporting pack delivered by an agreed working day. Commonly excluded and worth confirming: onboarding, catch-up, payroll, tax filing, active receivables or payables management, bespoke reporting and software subscriptions.