How Much Should Bookkeeping Cost for a Small Business?

For a service business doing $1-5M in revenue, monthly bookkeeping typically runs $500 to $2,500 a month, and a bookkeeping-plus-controller arrangement runs $2,500 to $5,500 a month. Three things move you inside that range: how many transactions you have, how clean your books already are, and whether anyone reviews the work or just records it. That is the whole pricing model in one sentence.

What actually drives the price

Bookkeeping is priced on effort. The more of the things below you carry every month, the more you pay for someone to keep up with them.

• Transaction volume. This is the single biggest lever, and it moves real money. As a rough feel, going from 200 transactions a month to 800 often adds $300 to $600 to a monthly fee, and clearing 2,000 can push you to the top of the range on volume alone.
• Number of accounts. Every bank account, credit card, loan, and merchant processor is another feed someone has to reconcile.
• Payroll and contractors. Running W-2 payroll and tracking 1099 contractors adds real monthly work.
• How far behind you are. Clean current books are cheap to maintain. Books six months behind need a cleanup first. Catch-up work usually runs about half to a full month of the going monthly fee for each month you are behind, billed once, before normal pricing starts.
• Whether anyone reviews the work. Pure data entry is the cheap tier. A reviewed monthly close, where someone checks the numbers before they reach you, costs more and is worth more.

Make it concrete. A $3M marketing agency with four bank and card accounts, eight employees on payroll, a handful of 1099 contractors, and roughly 600 transactions a month tends to land around $1,400 to $1,800 for a reviewed monthly close. Strip out the payroll and half the accounts at the same revenue, and that drops closer to $900.

A rough pricing map for a $1-5M service business

In practice these fall into three tiers. Read it as practitioner observation, not a published rate card, and treat the numbers as a feel rather than a quote. Yours can land outside.

One note on that top tier. A true controller owns the close, applies real accounting judgment, and designs your reporting. At the low end of the controller range, the quote is usually describing a senior reviewed close with light advisory, not a full-time controller's brain. Know which one it actually means before you compare two of them side by side.

How to tell if you are overpaying

Price alone tells you almost nothing. What you actually get for that price is the whole story. Watch for these signals that your current spend is off, and note that they cut in both directions:

• You pay for bookkeeping but still do not trust the numbers enough to make decisions from them. That is data entry dressed up as reporting.
• Your books are routinely weeks or months behind. A maintenance price for a service that is not being maintained.
• You cannot get a straight answer to "what was my real profit last month." That is a review problem, not a bookkeeping problem.
• The fee is controller-tier, but your operations are simple, your books are current, and nobody is actually using the reporting or the advisory calls. That is the reverse mistake, and it is more common than people admit. You bought the close someone reviews when all you needed was the close.

What the cheap quotes leave out

You are probably also holding a $200 to $300 flat-rate quote from a software-plus-offshore service. Those are real. For a current, simple set of books, they genuinely work, and pretending they do not exist would be dishonest. What they price out is judgment. They categorize and reconcile, but nobody who actually knows your business looks at the result and says this number is wrong, or notices that revenue is being booked in the wrong month, or asks why payroll jumped. Fine until the month it is not, which tends to be the exact month you are borrowing, hiring, or selling and someone finally reads the financials closely.

The honest answer

A $400 bookkeeper and a $2,500 controller are not the same service at two prices.

They are different services. Figure out which one you actually need first, before you let any quote anchor you, and the number stops looking confusing and starts looking like a choice you control.

If your books are current and simple and you just need them kept tidy, the low end is right and paying more is waste. If you make hiring, pricing, or borrowing calls off your financials, the reviewed tier usually pays for itself the first time it catches something before it becomes a problem. One catch can cover the year.