Bookkeeping Cost Calculator

Everything starts with hours. The calculator assigns a base monthly workload to your revenue tier, about 3 hours for a business under $25K a month, scaling to 25 hours at $500K+, then adjusts for the things that actually create bookkeeping work.

Your industry applies a multiplier (a restaurant's books take roughly 1.5x the time of a professional services firm at the same revenue). Each bank account or credit card beyond the first adds about half an hour of monthly reconciliation. Transaction volume above 50 per month adds time on a sliding scale. Payroll adds around 2 hours; sales tax filing adds about 1.5.

Those hours then get priced two ways. DIY values your own time at $150 per hour, an opportunity-cost figure, not a bill you receive. The freelance estimate uses a $45 hourly rate plus modest add-ons for payroll and sales tax. The CPA-led option is not priced here, because a CPA-led engagement covers the responsibility and tax oversight, not just the data entry, so Taxstra scopes and quotes it after a free initial consultation.

One of the most common questions small business owners ask is "How much should I pay for bookkeeping?" Across the market, monthly bookkeeping runs from about $200 to $2,500+. A small service business with under 100 monthly transactions typically lands at $200-$400. A mid-size e-commerce or restaurant operation with hundreds of transactions should expect $800-$1,500. Those figures cover categorization, reconciliation, and monthly financial statements, the baseline deliverables any competent provider should include.

Be wary of prices far outside these bands in either direction. A $99/month "bookkeeping" service at meaningful transaction volume usually means automated categorization with no human review, which you (or your tax preparer) end up paying to fix later. Pricing details for our own service are on the outsourced bookkeeping page.

DIY. Many owners start here to save money, and for the simplest businesses it works. The trap is that the cost is invisible: software is $30-$90 a month, but the hours are yours. At even a modest opportunity cost of $150/hour, 10 hours of monthly bookkeeping costs you $1,500 in lost productivity, plus the errors and missed deductions that come from doing accounting at 11pm after a full workday.

Freelance bookkeeper. Typically $25-$75 per hour for the mechanical work: recording transactions, reconciling accounts, producing statements. A good freelancer is a real upgrade over DIY. What's missing is the tax layer, a bookkeeper is generally not licensed to advise on entity structure, deduction strategy, or how a transaction should be treated for tax purposes, so the books get done but the planning doesn't.

CPA-led. Costs more per month, but the books are maintained by people who also prepare returns and plan taxes. Categorization decisions get made with the tax return in mind, problems surface in March of the current year instead of April of the next one, and the same team that closes your books can tell you whether an S-Corp election or a retirement plan contribution makes sense. Whether that oversight is worth the added fee depends on your facts, so put the question to every provider you compare.

Account sprawl. Every bank account and credit card is another monthly reconciliation. Five cards across three banks doesn't make your business more sophisticated, it makes your books slower and pricier. Consolidating to one operating account and one or two cards is the easiest fee reduction available.

Transaction volume. More transactions, more categorization. You can't reduce real sales, but you can stop running personal spending through business accounts, commingled transactions take the longest to sort and create the most questions.

Industry mechanics. Restaurants (daily sales, tips, high card volume), e-commerce (platform payouts, fees, returns, inventory), and construction (job costing, progress billing) all carry structural complexity that no provider can price away. Expect the multiplier and budget for it.

Add-on compliance. Payroll and sales tax filings are recurring deadlines with penalties attached, which is why they're priced as add-ons everywhere. If you need them, buy them from the same provider that keeps your books, split responsibility between vendors is where filings get missed.

Treat the output as a budgeting anchor, not a quote. If the DIY figure is several times the outsourced figures, the calculator is telling you your time has become the most expensive line item in your accounting, that's the signal to delegate. If you are weighing the freelance estimate against a CPA-led option, ask for a scoped quote and compare what each one includes.

When you compare real quotes against these estimates, ask every provider the same three questions: Who reviews the work, and what are their credentials? What exactly is included, statements, payroll, sales tax, 1099s, year-end tax prep coordination? And what happens when something is wrong, do they fix it, or bill you to fix it?

One more reason clean books matter beyond the monthly fee: your bookkeeping is the foundation of every tax position you take. Deductions survive IRS scrutiny when they're supported by organized, contemporaneous records, and tax strategies like an S-Corp election with reasonable compensation are only as defensible as the financials behind them.

If your result raised more questions than it answered, that's normal, pricing is the last step of scoping, not the first. Book a free accounting consultation and we'll scope your situation and give you a real number.