How Much Does Bookkeeping Cost? Real Price Ranges

How much does bookkeeping cost? For most small businesses, somewhere between $200 and $900 a month — and any page that gives you a narrower number without asking about your transaction volume is guessing. The spread is real rather than evasive: bookkeeping is priced on how much work your books actually generate, and two businesses with identical revenue can sit at opposite ends of that range for reasons that have nothing to do with size. Below are the current ranges by delivery model, the handful of factors that decide where you land, and the arithmetic to sanity-check any quote you are handed.

The short answer: what bookkeeping costs

Monthly bookkeeping for a small business generally falls into four bands, depending on who does the work. These are national market ranges as of 2026:

Who does the work	Typical monthly cost	Best suited to
You, in accounting software	$35–$115 in software, plus your time	Very simple books, under ~100 transactions a month
Freelance bookkeeper	$300–$1,200	Established businesses with moderate complexity
Online bookkeeping service	$200–$500	Simple, standard books with no unusual requirements
CPA firm	$400–$1,500+	S-corps, payroll, job costing, or books that feed tax planning

In West Michigan specifically, the middle of that market is tighter. Local firms typically tier monthly bookkeeping at $200–$400 for a simple sole proprietorship, $400–$600 once there are a couple of accounts and some contractor payments, and $600–$800 where payroll and real complexity are involved. Our guide to what a CPA costs in Michigan breaks those tiers down alongside tax preparation and payroll fees.

If your quote sits far outside those bands in either direction, that is worth a question — not necessarily a red flag, but always a scope conversation.

What bookkeeping costs by delivery model

The single biggest reason quotes differ by a factor of five is that "bookkeeping" is sold by four quite different kinds of provider.

Doing it yourself in software

QuickBooks Online and Xero both sit in roughly the $35–$115 per month range for small-business plans as of 2026, depending on tier. That is the honest cash cost. The real cost is your time: a business with 100–200 transactions a month is a genuine 4–8 hours of work, every month, forever.

DIY is the right answer more often than a CPA firm's website usually admits. If you are a sole proprietor with one bank account, under about 100 transactions a month, no payroll and no inventory, software plus an hour or two of discipline is entirely sufficient — and you can always hand the file over later. It stops being the right answer the moment you fall behind, because catching up costs far more than staying current.

A freelance bookkeeper

Typically $300–$1,200 a month, or $30–$75 an hour for smaller engagements. You get a direct relationship with the person doing the work, and often real specialization in an industry.

The thing to understand is that "bookkeeper" is not a licensed title. There is no board, no exam and no continuing-education requirement behind the word, so quality varies more here than in any other band. That is not an argument against freelancers — many are excellent — it is an argument for references and a trial period.

An online bookkeeping service

Usually $200–$500 a month, frequently on an annual commitment. A team performs a standardized monthly close and you get reports through an app.

These are genuinely good value for genuinely simple books. The limitations show up at the edges: industry-specific accounts, unusual transactions, and the year-end handoff to whoever files your return. If your books need to be interpreted rather than just recorded, this band tends to disappoint.

A CPA firm

Usually $400–$1,500 a month for a small business, sometimes more. The work is done by staff under a CPA's supervision, and — this is the actual reason the price is higher — the same people handle your tax return.

What you are buying is the absence of a handoff. When bookkeeping and tax filing sit with one firm, nobody spends January reconstructing what a categorization in June was supposed to mean, and decisions that affect the return get caught while there is still time to act on them. If your books mainly exist to produce a tax outcome, that integration is where the money is. If you want the distinction in more detail, we cover it in CPA vs. bookkeeper.

What actually moves the price

Within any of those bands, six things decide where your quote lands.

1. Monthly transaction volume. This is the dominant factor by a wide margin — far more predictive than revenue. A consultancy invoicing $40,000 a month across four invoices is cheaper to maintain than a coffee shop turning over $40,000 across two thousand card payments.

Monthly transactions	Typical monthly fee
Under 100	$200–$500
100–300	$400–$800
300–700	$800–$1,500
700+	Quoted individually

2. How many accounts need reconciling. Every bank account, credit card, loan and payment processor is a separate monthly reconciliation. Five accounts is roughly five times the reconciliation work of one, regardless of how much money moves through them.

3. Payroll. Payroll adds posting, liability tracking and quarterly filings, and it is usually priced as an add-on rather than bundled. Expect it to move the total, not just the workload.

4. Entity type. A single-member LLC is the simplest case. An S-corp adds owner payroll, equity tracking and accountable-plan administration — genuinely more work every month, not just at year end.

5. Industry. Service businesses are the simplest. Construction and the trades add job costing and retainage; retail and e-commerce add inventory and payment-processor reconciliation; restaurants add daily sales and tip handling.

6. What condition the books are in now. If you are current, you are quoted for maintenance. If you are eight months behind, the first invoice is a cleanup project — see below.

Same revenue — very different quotes

The clearest way to see why "how much does bookkeeping cost" has no single answer is to price two real-shaped businesses at the same revenue.

Take a residential remodeling contractor and a solo therapist in private practice, both doing about $400,000 a year.

The contractor runs a business checking account, a fuel card, a card at the lumberyard, and a truck loan. Materials get bought for specific jobs, so costs have to be tracked per job or the profit on any individual project is unknowable. There are two employees and three 1099 subcontractors. Deposits arrive as progress payments that have to be matched against jobs rather than invoices. That is several hundred transactions a month across four accounts, plus payroll, plus job costing — a genuine $700–$900 a month engagement, and worth every dollar, because a contractor who cannot see per-job margin is guessing at the only number that matters.

The therapist has one business checking account, one card, and a practice-management system that batches insurance and client payments into a handful of deposits a month. No employees. No inventory. No job costing. Maybe forty transactions a month. That is comfortably a $200–$300 engagement.

Same revenue. A three-to-four-fold difference in price, and both quotes are fair. This is why any provider who quotes you before asking about accounts, payroll and transaction volume is either guessing high to protect themselves or guessing low and planning to adjust later.

How much bookkeeping costs depends on scope

Before you compare two quotes, check that they describe the same job. They usually do not.

"Bookkeeping" is a broad word. The federal occupational definition of a bookkeeping clerk stretches to preparing invoices, chasing overdue accounts and handling purchasing — but plenty of firms scope their monthly bookkeeping much more narrowly than that, and price accordingly. Neither approach is wrong. Comparing one against the other on price alone is.

A monthly bookkeeping engagement usually includes:

• Recording and categorizing every transaction to the general ledger
• Reconciling bank, credit card and loan accounts against statements each month
• A monthly profit and loss statement and balance sheet
• Year-end coordination with whoever prepares your return

Commonly priced separately, or excluded entirely: payroll processing, sales tax returns, 1099 preparation, year-end adjusting entries, invoicing and bill payment, and any advisory work. At 4K Accounting, monthly bookkeeping is built around keeping the books accurate and current in QuickBooks Online or Xero and feeding a clean year-end — you can see how we structure it on our bookkeeping services page.

Hiring in-house: the comparison everyone runs wrong

Nearly every article on this topic ends by comparing outsourcing to hiring, and nearly every one of them gets the arithmetic wrong in the same way: it compares a monthly outsourced fee against a bookkeeper's salary. Salary is not what an employee costs.

Two federal datasets let you do it properly:

• In the Bureau of Labor Statistics May 2025 occupational wage survey, the median hourly wage for bookkeeping, accounting and auditing clerks was $24.36, with a mean of $25.75 an hour, or $53,560 a year.
• In the BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation release for March 2026, private-industry workers at the median wage percentile cost employers $34.78 an hour in total, of which $24.15 was wages and $10.63 was benefits. Benefits accounted for about 31% of the total.

That second series is a reasonable proxy here because its $24.15 median private-industry wage sits within about one percent of the bookkeeping-clerk median. Applying the same ratio, a bookkeeper earning the May 2025 median costs roughly $35 an hour once payroll taxes and benefits are counted — about $73,000 a year, or $6,000 a month, for a full-time seat. Before software. Before a desk. Before covering vacations.

Two honest caveats: that figure is an estimate built from two separate national surveys, and the benefits ratio is an economy-wide private-industry average rather than a measurement of bookkeeping roles specifically. It is the right order of magnitude, not a quotation.

And here is the part the $6,000-versus-$500 comparison exists to obscure: most small businesses do not have a full-time job's worth of bookkeeping. If your books take six hours a month, hiring was never a real option — you would be buying 167 hours to use six. The genuine choice is between doing it yourself, a freelancer, a service and a firm. Hiring only enters the conversation somewhere north of roughly 25 hours a month of finance work, and by then you are usually hiring for more than bookkeeping.

Catch-up and cleanup work

If you are behind, the first thing you buy is not monthly bookkeeping — it is a cleanup, and it is quoted as a one-time project rather than folded into the monthly fee.

A year of catch-up for a small business typically runs $1,500–$5,000; two or three years, considerably more. That sounds steep next to a $400 monthly fee, and it is: cleanup is slower per transaction than maintenance, because the person doing it is reconstructing intent from a bank feed instead of asking you about it the week it happened.

It is also almost always worth doing rather than deferring. Unreconstructed books mean a return filed on estimates, deductions nobody knew to claim, and — if a lender or a buyer ever asks for financials — nothing to show them. The cost of a cleanup is knowable and finite. The cost of continuing without one is neither.

If you are starting from scratch rather than digging out, our guide to bookkeeping for small business covers how to set the system up so a cleanup never becomes necessary.

How to get a quote you can actually compare

A provider who can quote you responsibly will want four things before naming a price: your monthly transaction volume, how many accounts need reconciling, whether there is payroll, and what condition the books are in today. If nobody asks, the number you get is not a quote.

What a sound process looks like:

• A short discovery call. Fifteen to thirty minutes on volume, accounts, entity type and current state.
• A look at the actual file. Anyone quoting ongoing work should want to see the books first.
• A written scope. What is included, what is billed separately, what the monthly fee is, and what happens when your volume grows.
• A flat monthly fee. For recurring work, fixed beats hourly — you get budget certainty and your provider has no incentive to be slow. Hourly is appropriate for cleanups and migrations, where the scope genuinely is not knowable up front.

Two things worth pushing back on: an annual commitment signed before any work has been done, and a quote that arrives without a conversation. Both are avoidable.

You can see how we structure monthly bookkeeping and what is included at each level on our pricing page.

FAQ

Is $300 a month reasonable for bookkeeping?

For a straightforward business, yes — $300 a month is a normal price for a sole proprietorship or single-member LLC with one or two accounts, under about 100 transactions a month and no payroll. It becomes unrealistic once payroll, several accounts or job costing are involved; at that point the work simply takes longer than the fee covers, and something is usually being left out. The question to ask is not whether $300 is reasonable in the abstract, but what the $300 includes.

How much does a bookkeeper cost per hour?

Freelance bookkeepers commonly charge $30–$75 an hour, and firms $60–$150, depending on the market and who is doing the work. Those billed rates sit above the wage rate for the role — in the Bureau of Labor Statistics May 2025 survey, the median hourly wage for bookkeeping, accounting and auditing clerks was $24.36 — because a billed rate has to carry payroll taxes, benefits, software, supervision and unbilled time. That gap is normal in every professional service, not a markup peculiar to bookkeeping.

What is the cheapest legitimate bookkeeping option?

Doing it yourself in QuickBooks Online or Xero, at roughly $35–$115 a month for 2026 small-business plans, is the cheapest option that produces books anyone can actually use. Below the roughly $200 a month mark for outsourced work, you are usually buying data entry without reconciliation — which is not bookkeeping, and tends to cost more at year end than it saved during the year.

How much should a small business spend on bookkeeping?

Enough that the books are reconciled and current every month — that is the real standard, and it is a scope question rather than a budget question. In practice most small businesses land between $200 and $900 a month, scaling with transaction count, number of accounts and payroll. If the number you are paying does not produce a monthly profit and loss statement you trust, it is the wrong number regardless of how small it is.

How much does a one-time bookkeeping cleanup cost?

For a small business one year behind, typically $1,500–$5,000 as a fixed fee; two or three years behind runs considerably higher. Pricing depends on transaction volume, how many accounts are involved and what state the starting records are in. It should be quoted as a defined project after someone has looked at the file — not billed open-endedly by the hour.

What is included in a monthly bookkeeping fee, and what usually is not?

Normally included: categorizing transactions, reconciling accounts, and a monthly profit and loss statement and balance sheet. Frequently separate: payroll processing, sales tax returns, 1099 preparation, year-end adjusting entries, invoicing and bill payment, and advisory work. Every firm draws the line slightly differently, which is exactly why two quotes are not comparable until both scopes are in writing.

Is it cheaper to hire a bookkeeper or outsource?

For almost every small business, outsourcing — but not for the reason usually given. Using Bureau of Labor Statistics figures, a bookkeeper at the May 2025 median wage costs roughly $6,000 a month fully loaded once benefits and payroll taxes are included, against $200–$900 for outsourced monthly work. The more important point is that a small business rarely has a full-time job's worth of bookkeeping to give, so hiring is not usually a real alternative until finance work runs past roughly 25 hours a month.