Ledgerbrook / White-label bookkeeping
What is white-label bookkeeping?
White-label bookkeeping is an arrangement where an outside practitioner does the bookkeeping and your firm delivers it under its own name. The client stays your client, the invoice is yours, and the reports carry your branding. What you are buying is capacity and a finished file, not a subcontractor your client ever meets.
The words
White label, private label, outsourced
These get used as though they were three services. They are one arrangement described from three angles. Outsourced says the work happens outside your firm. White label says whose name is on it when it comes back. Private label is the same idea borrowed from retail, and means nothing different here.
The distinction worth caring about is not the label. It is whether the provider is structured so that your client never has a reason to learn their name — and whether they would still be structured that way if your client asked.
Mechanics
How the arrangement works
The part firms underestimate is the second step. A file that comes back needing an hour of cleanup before it can be sent to a client is not white-labelled capacity; it is a draft. The arrangement only saves time if the deliverable is finished to the standard your firm would have produced itself.
Diligence
What to check before your name goes on it
Your firm carries the professional risk on work it did not perform. That is the real trade, and it is worth four specific questions rather than a general impression.
The longer version of that list, written for the moment before you hand over a first file, is what to check before you subcontract. How this practice answers the access and records questions specifically is on the security page.
Margin
What it costs, and what it leaves
A white-label fee is a cost line against what your firm bills the client. The gap between the two is your margin on the file, and it is only predictable if the fee is published before you commit the client rather than quoted per file afterwards.
Monthly Close, Standard
Up to 3 bank or credit card accounts, and up to 200 transactions a month. The high-volume band is on the pricing page.
Cleanup
For a file that has to be corrected before a monthly cadence means anything. Priced per month of backlog.
Every figure, including the volume bands and the one-time work, is on the pricing page.
Fit
When it doesn't fit
White-labelling suits a firm that has the client relationships and needs the hours: an overflow month, a deadline, a roster growing faster than the team. It suits it whether that is one file or twenty.
It fits badly in two cases. A firm outsourcing every file, every month, indefinitely has a hiring decision in front of it rather than a vendor to find — that comparison is worked through on whether to subcontract at all. And a firm whose clients are on Xero or Sage is outside what this practice works in, which is QuickBooks Online.
Questions
The rest of the vocabulary
The three questions firms ask once they have the definition.
What is the difference between white-label and private-label bookkeeping?
Nothing, in practice. Both describe the same arrangement: work performed by one firm and delivered under another firm's name. “White label” is the term more common in accounting; “private label” comes from retail and gets used interchangeably. A provider who treats them as two different services is inventing a distinction to sell against.
Does the client know the work is outsourced?
That is your firm's call, not the provider's, and it should be settled in writing before the first file moves. What a white-label arrangement guarantees is that the decision stays yours: nothing in the deliverable, the file, or any correspondence names the provider unless you decide it does.
Is white-label bookkeeping the same as subcontracting?
Subcontracting is the commercial arrangement — a fixed fee per file, paid to an outside practitioner. White label describes whose name the finished work carries. Most subcontracted bookkeeping is white-labelled, but the two answer different questions, and a provider can be one without being the other.
Start
Ready to see it on a real file?
How this practice runs the arrangement — turnaround, what comes back, and what your firm keeps — is on the page for bookkeeping firms. If your clients are CPA-side rather than bookkeeping-side, the same work is framed for that on the page for CPA firms.
Accountant-level access, no card. The report is yours to keep either way.