Last updated: September 29, 2026
Almost nobody publishes what bookkeeping costs. You call around, get "it depends," fill out a form, and end up on a discovery call before anyone will say a number. That is a reasonable way to sell and an exhausting way to buy.
So here is our actual range, and then the honest part: what makes one business sit at the bottom of it and another at the top.
The short answer
Our monthly bookkeeping runs $250 to $5,000 per month. That is a twenty-fold spread, which sounds useless until you see what sits at each end.
| Monthly | Looks like | Typically |
|---|---|---|
| $250-$500 | Single-entity LLC, one bank account and one card, under about 100 transactions a month, no inventory, no payroll | Consultant, freelancer, solo professional practice |
| $500-$1,200 | One entity, a few accounts plus a payment processor, a few hundred transactions, maybe a handful of employees | Established service business, small agency, single-location shop |
| $1,200-$2,500 | Higher volume, inventory or job costing, several accounts to reconcile, monthly reporting an owner actually reads | Restaurant, contractor, e-commerce, growing operator |
| $2,500-$5,000 | Multiple entities or locations, multi-state, complex reconciliations, consolidated reporting | Multi-location group, business with related entities, anything with real structural complexity |
Where most owners misjudge themselves: they estimate off revenue. Revenue barely matters. A consultant billing $900,000 a year on twelve invoices is cheaper to keep books for than a $300,000 cafe running four hundred card transactions a week. What drives the price is how much stuff there is to reconcile.
The six things that move your number
| Driver | Pushes cost down | Pushes cost up |
|---|---|---|
| Transaction volume | Under 100/month | Several hundred, or daily card batches |
| Accounts to reconcile | One bank, one card | Multiple banks, several cards, Stripe, Square, PayPal |
| Entities | One | Two or more, with transactions between them |
| Inventory or job costing | None | Inventory that must tie to COGS, or costs tracked per job |
| Multi-state | Texas only | Sales tax or payroll in more than one state |
| Catch-up backlog | Current | Months or years behind |
You can place yourself in about ten minutes. Count the accounts that have to be reconciled every month, remembering that a payment processor counts as one because deposits arrive net of fees. Then pull one average month of statements and count the lines. Those two numbers, plus whether you have inventory, a second entity, or another state, put you within one band of where a quote will land.
That last row is worth a note, because it is the one that surprises people. Catch-up work is quoted as its own project rather than folded into the monthly number, since it is finite. Bringing a year of neglected books current is a defined piece of work with an end; keeping them current afterward is the subscription. Our catch-up bookkeeping guide walks through how to scope your own backlog before anyone quotes it.
Fixed monthly, not billed by the hour
Most of the profession still bills time. We do not, and the reason matters when you are comparing quotes.
| Comparison | Billed by the hour | Fixed monthly |
|---|---|---|
| What you know upfront | An hourly figure and an estimate | The actual number |
| What a question costs you | Something | Nothing |
| Who absorbs a messy month | You | Us |
| Incentive on efficiency | Slower work bills more | Better process protects margin |
| What arrives in month three | An invoice you have to interpret | The same number as month one |
The practical difference is the second row. Under hourly billing, owners stop calling. They sit on a question about an owner draw or a new state for six weeks because picking up the phone has a price, and the six-week delay costs more than the call would have. Fixed pricing exists to remove that hesitation. It is not a discount, it is a different risk split.
What the monthly fee does not include
Three things are priced separately, and you should confirm the same boundaries with anyone you are comparing us against.
| Service | Price | Model |
|---|---|---|
| Tax preparation and planning | $500-$4,000 | One-time per engagement, scaled to return complexity |
| Payroll | $80/month base plus $10 per employee per month | Recurring |
| Catch-up or cleanup | Quoted as a project | One-time, scoped to the backlog |
So a real total looks like arithmetic rather than a single number. A single-location business at $650/month for bookkeeping with six employees on payroll runs $650 plus $80 plus $60, or $790 a month, with tax preparation landing separately once a year.
Tax preparation scales with the return, not the bookkeeping. An individual return alongside a single-member LLC sits near the bottom of that band. Multi-state, multiple entities, or a return with trust or partnership components sits higher.
There is a fourth category worth asking about, because practices differ and it is where comparison quotes drift apart: the recurring compliance filings that sit next to bookkeeping without being bookkeeping. Sales tax returns. Annual 1099 preparation for contractors. The Texas franchise report, which is due every year even when no tax is owed. Some providers fold these into the monthly fee, some bill them as they come up, and some do not handle them at all and will not mention it until January. Get each one named explicitly in writing before you compare two numbers, because a quote that excludes all three is not competing with one that includes them.
How to compare quotes without getting fooled
Prices are only comparable when the scope is. Six questions that surface the differences:
- Is this a bookkeeper or a CPA firm? A bookkeeper records transactions. Only a licensed CPA can advise on tax strategy and represent you before the IRS. Both are legitimate purchases; they are not the same purchase, and the cheaper quote is often the narrower one.
- Are reconciliations included every month, on every account? This is the line item that separates real books from categorized transactions, and it is the one most often quietly missing.
- What happens when I have a question? Ask specifically whether questions are billable and what the expected response time is.
- Who actually does the work, and will I keep them? National platforms reassign account managers. Ask whether one named person owns your file.
- Is tax preparation included or separate? A monthly quote that sounds high may include a return the cheaper one bills for in March.
- What does the price do when I grow? Find out what triggers a repricing before you sign, not after you add a location.
On that first question: the national bookkeeping platforms are built software-first, with bookkeepers behind the software. That produces clean monthly output and no tax strategy, no IRS representation, and nobody who knows your file the way a partner does. We have not published a price comparison against them because their pricing tiers change often enough that any figure we printed would be stale within a quarter. Compare the scope questions above directly against whatever they quote you today.
What you get for it at any level
At every point in the band, the monthly work is the same shape: transactions categorized, every account reconciled, the month closed, statements produced, and a CPA who has looked at them. What changes across the band is volume and complexity, not care.
What you are buying past the mechanics is the absence of a surprise. Clean books are what make quarterly tax planning possible, what let you answer a lender in an afternoon, and what turn an entity-structure conversation into arithmetic instead of a guess. The cost of not having them shows up as missed deductions, a wrong entity election left in place for three years, or a penalty, and those are rarely smaller than the fee.
Want your actual number instead of a range?
Tell us how many accounts you reconcile, roughly how many transactions you run a month, and whether you are behind, and we will quote one fixed monthly figure.
The Bottom Line
Bookkeeping for a small business runs $250 to $5,000 a month, and your position in that range is set by transaction volume, how many accounts need reconciling, how many entities you run, whether you carry inventory, whether you operate in more than one state, and how far behind you are. Revenue is a poor predictor. Payroll adds $80 a month plus $10 per employee, tax preparation runs $500 to $4,000 per engagement, and catch-up work is a separate project. When you compare quotes, compare scope first: whether reconciliations are included, whether questions are billable, whether a CPA or a bookkeeper is doing the work, and whether one named person will still own your file next year.
