The range
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
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.
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
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.
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
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:
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
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.
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
Seven questions. Ask both providers the same ones and the difference between $400 and $900 usually explains itself.
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
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