Services
Monthly bookkeeping run entirely in Xero — closed, reviewed and proven every period by the team that does the work.
Bookkeeping packages
The real number
What a Hire Actually Costs
The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes what employers pay in total, not just in wages. For full-time private industry workers in June 2026, wages and salaries accounted for 68.5 percent of employer compensation costs and benefits for the remaining 31.5 percent.
Applied to the median bookkeeper wage, that is roughly $23,000 of benefits on top of $50,670, before anything else. Payroll taxes, health insurance, paid leave, retirement contributions and workers’ compensation are all inside that figure.
| Cost | Annual | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Salary | $50,670 | BLS median, May 2025 |
| Benefits and payroll taxes | around $23,000 | BLS ratio of benefits to wages, June 2026 |
| Software | $1,200 to $2,400 | Accounting platform, document capture, payroll. Estimate. |
| Equipment and workspace | $1,500 to $3,000 | Laptop, desk, share of overhead. Estimate. |
| Recruiting | varies | Advertising, your time, agency fee if used |
| Your review time | varies | The hours you spend checking work you cannot fully verify |
Salary and benefits alone bring a median hire to roughly $74,000 a year, or about $6,200 a month. Add software and workspace and it is higher. That is the number to compare against, not $50,670.
Only the first two rows are published figures. The rest are estimates that vary by business and location, and they are marked as such deliberately. Anyone presenting the whole table as fact is selling you something.
Off the spreadsheet
The Costs Nobody Budgets
Four of these are structural rather than financial, which is why they never appear in a comparison and why they are usually what goes wrong.
- Cover. One person means holidays, sickness and notice periods all stop the books. Most small businesses discover this the first time a close is due during a two-week absence.
- Turnover. When the bookkeeper leaves, the process goes with them, because it was never written down anywhere except in their head. The replacement spends months learning what the last person knew, and the file usually degrades in between.
- No separation of duties. One person entering, approving and reconciling is a control weakness regardless of how good they are. It is also the first thing a lender or an auditor asks about, and the answer cannot be fixed retrospectively.
- No review. Nobody checks the work. Errors persist until something forces them into the open, which is usually a year end or a funding round.
- Your time. The one owners underestimate most. Hiring, onboarding, answering questions, checking work you are not qualified to check, and managing someone whose output you cannot easily verify.
None of these are arguments against employing someone. They are the things an honest comparison has to include, because they are the difference between a salary and a functioning accounting operation.
The other side
What Outsourcing Costs
Published 2026 guides put outsourced bookkeeping at roughly $200 to $2,000 a month for a US small business. Full-charge service, meaning the whole cycle with a closed month, typically runs $500 to $2,000, with the midpoint on a clean file nearer $400 to $600.
At $600 a month, that is $7,200 a year against roughly $74,000 for a median hire. The gap is large enough that the interesting question is not which is cheaper but what you give up.
What you stop paying for
- Payroll taxes, benefits, paid leave, workers’ compensation
- Recruiting, onboarding and the risk of hiring the wrong person
- Equipment, workspace and software licences in your name for the provider’s tools
- Cover during absence, which the firm carries rather than you
What you give up
- Immediacy, for reliability. Someone down the corridor answers now. A firm answers within an agreed window, and the close still lands on the agreed working day when that person is on holiday.
- Context, for range. An employee absorbs your business by being in it. A firm brings pattern recognition from hundreds of other files, which is how a problem gets spotted before you describe it.
- Flexibility, for a defined scope. An employee can be asked to do something adjacent. A firm works to a scope, which is also why bookkeeping never gets deprioritised for something more urgent.
- Direct control, for review. You set priorities for an employee directly. With a firm you set them through an engagement, and in exchange someone other than the person doing the work checks it.
The first two are real losses and are the reason some businesses keep the function in-house past the point where the maths says otherwise. The other two are trades rather than losses. Defined scope looks like a limitation until you have been on the other side of an employee who was busy with something else during close week.
Side by side
The Two, Compared
| In-house hire | Outsourced firm | |
|---|---|---|
| Annual cost | Roughly $74,000 for a median hire, before software and workspace | Roughly $5,000 to $24,000 depending on volume and scope |
| Cover during absence | None, unless you employ two | Carried by the firm |
| Separation of duties | Not possible with one person | Built in, if the firm reviews its own work |
| Process ownership | Lives in the person | Lives in the firm and is documented |
| Responsiveness | Immediate | Within an agreed window |
| Business context | Deep, absorbed daily | Learned from the file and from you |
| Scaling up | Another hire | A change of tier |
| Risk when they leave | The process leaves too | Someone else already knows the file |
The honest case
When In-House Wins
Four situations where hiring is the better answer, and we would say so.
- The role is bigger than bookkeeping. If the person also handles purchasing, customer accounts, office management or scheduling, you are hiring an operations person who happens to keep the books. Outsourcing the bookkeeping alone leaves the rest unstaffed.
- Volume is genuinely high and complexity is genuinely low. A business with thousands of routine, similar transactions and no structural complications may find a full-time person cheaper than a volume-priced engagement.
- The work has to be on site. Cash handling, physical documents, a counter that needs staffing. Some businesses still have this.
- You are building a finance function on purpose. If a controller and then a finance team is the plan, starting with an employee who grows into it is a reasonable path.
The hybrid most people miss
An in-house person handling daily operations, invoicing and supplier contact, with an outside firm doing reconciliation, the close and the reporting. You keep the immediacy and the context, and you get review by a second party. It costs more than outsourcing alone and less than a senior hire, and it is often the right answer for a business between the two.
The switch point
Where the Crossover Sits
On price alone, outsourcing wins for most businesses under roughly $5 million in revenue, and the gap is wide rather than marginal. That is not the useful question, because price is rarely why a business hires.
The better test is whether the work is a job or a function.
- A job is a set of tasks someone performs. If that is all it is, buying it from a firm is cheaper and carries less risk.
- A function needs owning: priorities, judgment, a person who knows the business and makes decisions inside it. That wants an employee, and usually a more senior one than a bookkeeper.
Most small businesses think they are hiring for a function and are actually hiring for a job. The tell is the job description. If it lists tasks rather than responsibilities, the work can be bought.
BLS projects employment of bookkeeping, accounting and auditing clerks to decline 6 percent between 2025 and 2035, which it attributes to software automating routine work. The role is not disappearing, but a hire made today should be evaluated on judgment rather than on data entry.
Questions
Commonly Asked
Is outsourced bookkeeping cheaper than hiring?
For most businesses under roughly $5 million in revenue, substantially. The median wage for a bookkeeping, accounting or auditing clerk was $50,670 in May 2025, and BLS data shows benefits add around 31.5 percent of total employer compensation costs for full-time private industry workers, bringing a median hire to roughly $74,000 a year before software and workspace. Full-charge outsourced bookkeeping typically runs $500 to $2,000 a month. The gap is wide enough that price is rarely the deciding factor; scope and control usually are.
What is the fully loaded cost of a bookkeeper?
Salary plus benefits and payroll taxes, plus software licences, equipment and workspace, plus recruiting, plus the owner's time spent managing and reviewing. Using BLS figures, salary and benefits alone bring a median hire to around $74,000 a year. The remaining items vary by business but are rarely zero.
What do I lose by outsourcing?
Immediacy and context, mainly, and each comes with something in return. You lose the person down the corridor who answers now, and you gain a close that lands on the agreed day whether or not any individual is available. You lose the context an employee absorbs by being in the building, and you gain pattern recognition from hundreds of other files. You lose the ability to redirect someone onto an urgent task, and you gain a function that never gets deprioritised. And you lose direct control over how the work is done, in exchange for it being reviewed by someone other than the person who did it, which one employee structurally cannot provide.
Can I have both?
Often the best answer for a business in the middle. An in-house person handles daily operations, invoicing and supplier contact; an outside firm handles reconciliation, the close and reporting. You keep the immediacy, and you gain review by a second party, which one person alone structurally cannot provide.
What happens when an in-house bookkeeper leaves?
The process usually leaves with them, because in most small businesses it was never documented. The replacement rebuilds it while the file degrades, and the gap between the two is when errors accumulate. This is the single biggest structural argument for a firm, where the method belongs to the organisation rather than to an individual.
Is bookkeeping being automated away?
Partly. BLS projects employment of bookkeeping, accounting and auditing clerks to decline 6 percent between 2025 and 2035, attributing it to software handling routine tasks. Coding and matching are increasingly automated. Deciding whether the file is right, why a control account does not agree, and what to do about it is not. That shifts what a bookkeeping hire should be evaluated on.