Guide to Pricing Accounting Services Fixed & Value Pricing

Its bookkeeping service comes with its Enterprise plan, which costs $399 per month when billed annually. You’ll get a dedicated accountant, year-round tax advice, tax prep, bookkeeping and financial reports. Like traditional bookkeepers, online bookkeeping services (like Pilot) employ a number of professional bookkeepers to provide their clients with books service. Unlike many traditional firms, online providers aren’t usually restricted by geography, so their services are available anywhere in the US. In addition to these basic bookkeeping activities, your costs will be impacted by how your accounting systems, policies and procedures, and reporting needs are set up and administered.

I’m an entrepreneurial CPA that founded Xen Accounting, a
100% cloud-based accounting firm, in 2013. Following its acquisition in 2018,
I started Future Firm to help accountants fast-track the growth of a modern, scalable accounting firm of their own. Fixed-pricing looks at your costs in advance and applies your desired margin and voila, you have your price per month. Whether or not it makes sense for your small business client or not is another story. Not especially since it looks at your costs and applies a margin to arrive at your price.

Part-Time Bookkeeping for Small to Medium Businesses

Every financial transaction should have a line item in the general ledger, which tracks everything in one place. The general ledger notates the account number to which the debit or credit is applied. The best accounting software automates a lot of the process in journal entries for regular debits and credits to help eliminate possible errors in data entry. Bookkeeping is the process of tracking income and expenses in your business. It lets you know how you’re doing with cash flow and how your business is doing overall.

Generally, small to medium-sized businesses expect to pay between $500-$2,500 USD monthly for their outsourced bookkeeping—an dauntingly large range to deal with. Additionally, there are quite a few outside expenses that come with hiring an employee. At minimum, they need to provide you with an office space, a desk, and a computer. As a contractor, you’re using all your own equipment, so you’re saving them all of that money. In the past, it was popular for bookkeepers to charge per transaction. To be honest, I’ve never done it that way, so I’m not as familiar with what the rates would be for this type of pricing.

Your bookkeeper categorizes transactions and reconciles accounts for you, freeing up time to focus on your business. Have a bookkeeper categorize expenses, reconcile accounts, and close your books with guaranteed accuracy, so you know where your business stands. Xero does not provide accounting, tax, business or legal advice. This guide has been provided for information purposes only. You should consult your own professional advisors for advice directly relating to your business or before taking action in relation to any of the content provided.

• Once you have arrived at your price for a particular mandate, the next step is to have a mutual agreement in place that documents your understanding of the scope of work and price per month.
• One of the main benefits of such an approach is that you can customize the services you want the bookkeeper to provide.
• They will appreciate the work you do, and some will even tell you so.
• Business owners can then use those financial reports to make better-informed financial decisions to boost the growth and profitability of a company.

Accrual accounting provides a more accurate picture of a business’s financial health, as it considers all of the financial transactions for a given period. This accounting method is useful for businesses with inventory or accounts payable and receivable. Forbes Advisor analyzed 13 online bookkeeping services and considered 15 metrics such as price, features, customer service, ease of use, integrations and service level. We also looked at real customer experiences to determine if their expectations were met based on what each company promised.

You don’t know how long a bookkeeping project will take.

Each plan comes with a finance expert, automated transaction imports, P&L, balance sheet and cash flow statements. You’ll also get burn rate calculations, which is helpful for startups that need to closely track their spending. If you can manage your job and some of the accounting each month but need a little extra help, a part-time bookkeeper might be a good fit for your business. They can do work such as inputting receipts and tracking employee timesheets, accounts receivable and accounts payable.

Bookkeeping services pricing guide: How to nail your pricing

Once you have arrived at your price for a particular mandate, the next step is to have a mutual agreement in place that documents your understanding of the scope of work and price per month. By the end of that conversation, you should work on your scope in Step 2, define your service offer and try to attach a price to it. Value pricing takes a bit of a different approach compared to fixed pricing. If you provide a price upfront, then you want to make sure that each minute that you spend on the mandate is something that you have explicitly agreed to work on. If not, then you may find yourself in an unprofitable mandate.

Step 3 – Establishing Pricing

You’ll need to set a menu of all of your additional services and then attach a price to each one. With my small clients, I do all the regular bookkeeping tasks, such as hooking their banks up to QuickBooks Online, categorizing all their transactions, and reconciling at the end of the month. However, for this client, I also do receipt management, which is probably the most time-consuming task I do for this preschool. If I’m looking at a cleanup or catch-up project, I start with a paid diagnostic review so that I can get a full scope of work before I ever take on the cleanup.

How Much Do Bookkeeping Services for Small Businesses Cost?

Clients need a variety of services, ranging from basic to complex. By bundling services together, you separate your fees from time. This, of course, allows you to charge more without working any additional hours. I don’t think this is as viable for someone doing a regular set of recurring services each month.

Types of services

Beneath all of that, the client’s bookkeeping needs per month may require extra time before financial statements are delivered. Customer expectations are changing, and they are now more insistent than ever on upfront pricing. This is pushing accountants like you to ditch hourly rates in favor of a new pricing strategy and accept payments online method, which sometimes creates confusion about how to set your accounting services fees. I struggled with various issues when trying to come up with a price for my bookkeeping services for years. I tried to determine a price by counting transactions, and then I tried it by linking it to the number of bank accounts.

In some cases, your cleanup may take longer depending on timeliness of documentation and the complexity of your books. If your monthly average is $50,001 or more, the monthly price for QuickBooks Live is $400. If your monthly average is $10,001-50,000, the monthly price for QuickBooks Live is $300. If your monthly average is $0-10,000 per month, the monthly price for QuickBooks Live is $200. A guide to help you work through the big decisions around starting a bookkeeping business.