Outsourced bookkeeping for bookkeeping firms

No, and it's written into the engagement rather than promised in conversation. A subcontractor who also sells direct is a competitor holding your client list, and no amount of white labelling fixes that. So: any business you introduce is your client permanently, we don't market to them, and we won't accept a direct engagement from them, including after your firm's relationship with them ends.

We do also sell directly to small businesses, and pretending otherwise would be worse than saying it plainly. In practice there's a hard line between the two: a name that arrives from your firm is off the direct list for good.

Monthly close starts at $99 per client file per month, and cleanup runs $99 per month of backlog. Same published figure whether you send us one file or fifty. There's no partner rate to negotiate and no volume tier that quietly reprices a file once you've committed. What your firm charges its own client on top is your margin, and we have no view on what it should be.

Worked through: one file on a monthly cadence costs your firm $1,188 over a year, known on the day you take the client and unchanged if the file turns out to be harder than it looked. Your retainer for that client, minus that, is the margin, and it is the same arithmetic on the second file and the twentieth. That is the part hiring can't match: a salary is a fixed cost whether or not the clients arrive, and this one only exists per file, per month you actually use it.

For the market-wide version of this question rather than ours, what outsourced bookkeeping costs covers what moves the price and how to read a quote from anywhere else.

Nothing extra. White-label isn't a pricier tier, it's simply how we deliver by default, at the same $99-per-file monthly fee whether or not your client ever learns we exist. What you charge on top of that fixed cost, once the file comes back clean, is yours to set.

We take files in batches with a scheduled delivery date each, instead of accepting them open-endedly and queueing them. So the honest answer to “can you take ten more” depends on when they're due, and you get that answer before you commit a client rather than after. That includes “no, not by that date,” which is the answer a subcontractor is most tempted to avoid giving.

A file that arrives current stays on a monthly cadence closed by the 5th business day. A file that arrives behind gets caught up first, priced per month of backlog, with the monthly cadence starting the moment it's current. One continuous engagement rather than two, so there's no gap between “caught up” and “current.”

One file, if that's where you want to start. There is no minimum number of files, no minimum term, no notice period and nothing to sign beyond your own firm's NDA and engagement terms. If your firm wants its own contract for this, what a subcontractor agreement should contain sets out the clauses. The fee is agreed per file before any work starts, and you can stop after any month without owing anything further. Accountant access is revoked from the client's own user list, without asking us.

That is deliberate rather than generous. A subcontractor who needs a twelve-month commitment to take your work is asking you to carry the risk of finding out whether they're any good, and the honest way to sell fixed-fee production is to let the work be the argument.

Accountant-level access to the client's QuickBooks Online company, the last two statements for any account not already on the bank feed, and whatever your firm's own conventions are: a chart of accounts you standardize on, a close checklist, a report pack your client expects. We work to your conventions, not imposing ours, because the file has to look like your firm's work when it comes back. If your firm has no cleanup checklist of its own yet, ours is published, written to the person doing the work rather than the person buying it.

If the QuickBooks login sits with the client instead of your firm, we're happy to send the access request straight to them with your firm named as the reason, so you're not the one chasing credentials from someone slow to answer email.

We sign your firm's NDA rather than asking you to sign ours. Access is accountant-level only, which is enough to categorize, reconcile and run reports and not enough to touch billing or delete a company file, and you revoke it at any time from the client's own user list without asking us.

Client documents stay in the client's QuickBooks file or in a folder your firm controls. We don't build a parallel archive of your clients' records, which also means there's nothing of yours to hand back at the end of an engagement. It was never held separately in the first place.

The long version, covering working practice, incident disclosure, what happens at the end of an engagement, and the certifications we deliberately don't claim, is on the security page. Send us your vendor questionnaire and we'll answer it straight, including the questions where the answer is no.

No. A CPA license is required in all 50 states to sign an audit opinion, not to categorize transactions or reconcile a bank account. Bookkeeping itself isn't a credentialed activity. What matters far more for continuity is the same person on the file every month instead of whoever happens to be free that week.

That's the standard the engagement is built to, whoever is on the file: a named person who stays with the same client roster month after month, not a queue a file passes through.

US bookkeeping firms on QuickBooks Online with more files than hours: turning work away, carrying a file that should have been handed off months ago, or covering a departure. It fits equally well for one overflow file and for a standing roster.

It's not the right fit if your clients are on Xero or Sage, if you'd prefer a dedicated seat billed by the hour to a fixed fee per file, or if you need same-day turnaround measured in hours. (For why we standardize on QuickBooks, read our firm owner analysis of QuickBooks vs Xero for a firm.)

Yes. Firm owners frequently spend all their capacity closing client files and leave their own internal books untouched for months (see why firm owners neglect their own books). We can close your firm's file on the exact same fixed-fee schedule as your client files.