What outsourced bookkeeping costs in 2026

Why outsourced bookkeeping prices vary across providers

Search this question and you get a page of guides from bookkeeping firms. They are well written, they explain the variables honestly, and almost every one of them ends at a contact form.

That is not evasion, exactly. The honest version of the problem is that two businesses with identical revenue can be four times apart in effort, so a single headline figure would be wrong for most readers. The dishonest part is what gets built on top of that: a discovery call whose real purpose is to find out what you are currently paying before quoting.

This practice publishes its whole schedule instead. The figures are further down. First, what actually moves them, because understanding that is what lets you judge any quote, including one from somewhere else.

The three things that set the price

How many accounts the file has. Every bank account, every credit card, every line of credit is a separate feed to categorize and a separate statement to reconcile. Two accounts and eight are not the same job even at identical transaction counts, because reconciliation is per account and it is the part that cannot be skipped.

How many transactions run through it. The volume driver, and the one people expect. Worth noting that volume and revenue separate fast: a retailer doing $30,000 a month across 900 card transactions is far more work than a consultancy doing $30,000 across four invoices.

Whether the past is already right. This is the one that surprises people. Monthly work assumes the file is correct as of the start date. If the last fourteen months were never reconciled, that is a separate job with a separate price, and any monthly fee quoted without someone having looked at the file is a guess about the second thing dressed up as a price for the first.

What sets the price	Why it moves the price	How Ledgerbrook prices it
Number of accounts	Each account is its own feed and its own reconciliation	Sets the monthly band: Up to 3 accounts, up to 200 transactions a month, or more
Transaction volume	More lines to categorize; volume and revenue separate fast	The same two bands
Whether the past is right	Monthly work assumes the file is correct at the start	A separate cleanup or catch-up, $99 per month of backlog

Two more that move it less often but move it a lot when they do: whether inventory is tracked in the file, and whether the business needs class, location or multi-entity reporting.

What does not set the price, whatever anyone tells you

Revenue. Two clients doing the same transaction volume through the same number of accounts are the same work, and charging one of them more because they sell at a higher margin is charging for the client’s success rather than for the bookkeeping.

Hours, ideally. Hourly billing prices the work at the speed of whoever is doing it, which means a slower bookkeeper costs more for the same output, and getting faster costs you money. It also leaves the client unable to forecast, which is the practical objection they will actually voice.

The schedule

Per client file, every figure, no quote request.

Monthly close. Two bands: Up to 3 accounts, up to 200 transactions a month is the first, and More accounts, more transactions, or multi-entity reporting is the second.

$99 –  to $199per client file, per month

Cleanup, for months that exist and are wrong. Priced by how far back the problem runs, so a six-month problem is six units and a two-year problem is twenty-four.

$99per month of backlog20% off 6+ months

Catch-up, for months that were never entered at all. Same unit, same rate, whatever is in them.

$99per month of backlog20% off 6+ months

New file setup, for a QuickBooks Online company built from scratch or rebuilt after a migration.

$199one-time

Year-end handoff pack, the file closed and documented for whoever prepares the return.

$199per client, one-time

File review is free and takes about 48 hours. It exists because the honest answer to “what will this cost” is usually “let me look at the file,” and that look should not cost anybody anything.

The pricing page carries the full version, including what is in scope at each band and what is not.

Reading a quote from anywhere else

Four questions get you most of the way. For cleanup quotes specifically, what QuickBooks cleanup costs compares every firm that publishes a price. For monthly fees, the best bookkeeping services for small business sets nine published prices side by side, and how much a bookkeeper costs puts them against a freelancer or an in-house hire.

Is the figure per client file or per firm? For a practice buying capacity this is the difference between a predictable unit cost and an invoice that moves every month.

What happens when volume changes? A price with no stated band will be renegotiated, and it will be renegotiated at the moment you are busiest.

Is cleanup included, and what was it scoped from? If nobody has opened the file, it was not scoped. It was assumed.

Who actually does the work, and does that person change? Continuity is a price variable that never appears in a price. A file worked by a different person each month costs you the time to re-explain it every month, and that time is yours.

What a firm buying capacity is really comparing against

If you run a bookkeeping or CPA firm, the comparison is not against another vendor’s rate card. It is against hiring.

An employee is a salary plus payroll taxes plus software seats plus the weeks before they are productive, and the whole of it is fixed whether or not the work is there. Subcontracted capacity is variable, per file, and it disappears when a client leaves. That flexibility is what you are paying for, and it is worth more to a firm with seasonal swings than to one with a flat book.

The other half of it is what you charge. A firm reselling a monthly close at its own rate, white-labelled under its own name, keeps the difference, and the arithmetic only works if the underlying figure is stable and published rather than negotiated per client. The firms page covers how that works in practice and the subcontracting piece covers the margin question directly.

Why Ledgerbrook publishes its prices

Two reasons, and neither is generosity.

A published price filters. The conversations that start after someone has read the schedule are about the file rather than about the number, which is a better use of both people’s time, and the businesses for whom this is genuinely too expensive find that out without a call.

And a price you have to ask for is a price that varies by who is asking. Once it is on a page it is the same for everybody, which is a constraint I would rather work under. Three illustrative worked examples show how the schedule adds up on a whole file.

Before any of it, the file review

The reason nobody can quote this question accurately from the outside is that the file is the only place the answer lives. Transaction counts, account counts, and whether the last year reconciles are all facts, and all three are visible in about half an hour of looking.

That review is free, it takes around 48 hours, and it comes back with what is actually wrong and which of the offers above applies. If it turns out the file is fine and all you need is a monthly close, that is what it will say.