How Much Does Bookkeeping Cost for a Small Business in 2026?

What actually drives the price

Four things move the number more than revenue does: transaction volume, the number of bank and credit card accounts you're reconciling, how far behind the books currently are, and whether you need categorization only or a full monthly close with reporting. A business doing $30,000 a month through one account can cost less to book than one doing $20,000 a month through five accounts and a payment processor.

DIY: the cost of doing it yourself

Software alone is cheap. QuickBooks Online runs $35 to $235 a month depending on the plan, and Digits and similar tools run in a comparable range. The real cost is time. Most owners doing their own books spend 5 to 10 hours a month on categorization and reconciliation, and that number climbs fast once a business crosses roughly $20,000 in monthly revenue or opens a second account. Valued at almost any reasonable billable rate, that time is worth more than what an outsourced bookkeeper charges — and it doesn't count the cost of pricing or hiring decisions made on numbers that turned out to be wrong.

Hiring in-house: part-time vs. full-time

A part-time bookkeeper, whether an employee or a contractor, typically runs $20 to $50 an hour, and a small business usually needs 10 to 20 hours a month — call it $300 to $1,000 monthly before any software costs. A full-time in-house bookkeeper is a different commitment: $45,000 to $65,000 in salary, plus payroll taxes and benefits that push the real cost closer to $60,000 to $85,000 a year. That only makes sense once transaction volume and complexity justify a full-time role, which is usually well above $1M in annual revenue.

Outsourced bookkeeping: what firms actually charge

For businesses under $50,000 in monthly revenue, outsourced bookkeeping typically runs $300 to $800 a month. Between $50,000 and $150,000 a month in revenue, expect $800 to $1,500. Above $250,000 a month, most firms move to custom pricing tied to transaction count and account complexity rather than a flat tier. Pricing usually scales with the number of financial accounts too — expect an extra charge, often around $35 a month, for each account beyond the first four. If a quote skips this detail entirely, ask about it before you sign, since it's the most common source of a bill that's higher than expected. Some of that spread also comes from hidden platform costs — apps bolted onto a bookkeeping stack to cover gaps the core software doesn't handle.

Catch-up and cleanup: the hidden cost

If your books are behind, expect a separate, one-time cleanup fee on top of the ongoing rate. A common formula is your monthly bookkeeping rate multiplied by the number of months behind, multiplied by roughly 0.75 — so six months behind at a $500 monthly rate lands around $2,250 for catch-up, billed once. It's not padding. Cleaning up six months of miscategorized transactions and unreconciled accounts genuinely takes close to as much work as six months of normal bookkeeping, just compressed into a shorter timeline.

What you should actually pay

As a rule of thumb: budget 1% to 2% of monthly revenue for solid outsourced bookkeeping once you're past $20,000 a month, and expect that percentage to shrink as revenue grows, since the work doesn't scale one-to-one with dollars in. If a quote is well below that range, check what's actually included — categorization only, with no reconciliation or reporting, is common at the low end. If you want the books to also answer questions about margin and profitability, not just stay current, that's usually a higher tier with a KPI scorecard attached, which is where knowing your real margins starts to become possible instead of a guess.

Frequently asked questions