What Factors Into Our Bookkeeping Pricing

We charge a flat rate for monthly bookkeeping, and every business is different. Here is what we actually look at when we put together a quote.

Number of Accounts

More bank accounts and more credit cards mean more statements to reconcile, more places for a transaction to get missed, and more opportunities for something to slip through the cracks if it isn’t watched closely. A business with one checking account and one credit card is simpler to maintain than a business juggling three accounts across two banks. The same goes for loans and capital leases. Each one needs to be tracked on the balance sheet, with principal and interest split correctly every month, which is a step a lot of cheaper bookkeeping services skip or get wrong.

Balance Sheet Complexity

If your business carries inventory, accounts receivable, or accounts payable, your books require real balance sheet work, not just bank feed categorization. Inventory has to be tracked and adjusted. Receivables and payables have to be matched against invoices and bills so your financials actually reflect what you’re owed and what you owe, not just what cleared the bank.

This is also where a lot of bookkeeping quietly fails. It is entirely possible to file a tax return off books that have an inaccurate balance sheet. The return looks fine on the surface, but the underlying numbers don’t roll forward correctly year to year, and the business owner has no real picture of what they own or what they owe. We price this work in because we don’t cut that corner.

Transaction Volume

Believe it or not, the number of transactions isn’t always the biggest driver of price. Every transaction that hits a bank account or credit card has to be categorized correctly, not just dumped into a generic bucket. A business with 50 transactions a month could actually cost more than a business with 300 transactions a month, if the 50 transactions are unique, include hand-written checks, or transfers without a bank description. 300 transactions that are all from the same three vendors, for the same three things aren’t so complicated to book!

Payroll and Sales Tax

If you run payroll through an outside provider, we still have to record those entries correctly each month, including payroll tax liabilities and any benefits or retirement contributions running through it. If we’re processing payroll directly, that’s accounted for separately. Sales tax adds its own layer of tracking and filing, especially for businesses selling in Kansas or collecting across multiple jurisdictions.

Multi-State Activity

Operating in more than one state usually means more than one set of filing requirements, more nuance in how income gets allocated, and more for us to track throughout the year so nothing gets missed at tax time. The more states involved, the more this adds to the workload.

Chart of Accounts and Reporting Needs

We have a standard chart of accounts that we know produces clean, tax-ready financials. If a business needs a custom chart of accounts, or needs reporting broken out by class, location, or project, that’s additional setup and maintenance work every month. It’s often worth it for businesses that use that data to make decisions, but it does add to the scope.

Responsiveness and Communication

This one surprises people, but it belongs on the list. Bookkeeping moves quickly when a client answers questions promptly, sends over documents when asked, and lets us know about changes in the business as they happen. It moves slowly, and ends up costing more in actual hours, when we’re chasing down a missing receipt for three weeks or trying to figure out what a mystery deposit was for after the fact. A client who communicates well is genuinely less expensive to serve than one who doesn’t, and our pricing accounts for that.

Why We Quote This Way Instead of by Revenue

Revenue alone tells us almost nothing about how much work a set of books requires. We’ve worked with a $2 million contractor whose books were genuinely simple, just a handful of accounts and predictable transaction patterns, and we’ve worked with a $400,000 business with messy receivables, multiple entities, and accounts in three states. The second business takes more time, so it costs more, even though the revenue is smaller.

Pricing off actual complexity means you’re not subsidizing someone else’s messy books, and you’re not paying for work your business doesn’t actually generate. It also means your fee can change over time. If your transaction volume grows, or you add a second bank account, or you start carrying inventory, we’ll talk with you about adjusting the fee, because the workload has genuinely changed. The same is true in the other direction. If a business simplifies, the fee can come down too.

Business Tax Returns Are Priced Off the Same Relationship

For our monthly clients, the business tax return isn’t a separate cold quote built from scratch every year. Because we’ve been in your books all year, preparing the return is far more efficient than it would be if a preparer were seeing your financials for the first time in March. That efficiency is part of why we can offer a fixed, predictable fee for the return instead of billing by the hour and hoping for the best.

The Bottom Line

Our pricing is built around the actual work your business requires, not a guess based on your industry or your revenue alone. If you want a quote, the most accurate way to get one is for us to look at your accounts directly, which is exactly what we do on a discovery call before we put a number in front of you.

Check out our pricing page for more info!