What bookkeepers charge
- Freelance bookkeepers: commonly $25 to $90 an hour, more in big cities.
- Monthly packages from a bookkeeping firm or online service: commonly $300 to $1,500 a month for a small business, more as you grow.
- Catching up months of missed books: usually billed separately, often by the hour.
- Year-end clean-up before your accountant can do your taxes: often extra, too.
Prices vary a lot by region, and quotes are usually based on how much work your books take.
What drives the price
- How many transactions you have. Going from 50 to 500 a month can double a bookkeeper's fee.
- How many bank and card accounts they have to match up.
- How messy things are: personal spending on the business card, missing statements, a backlog.
- Extras: sales tax or GST/HST, invoices, bills, payroll.
What you're paying for
Most of a bookkeeper's month is the same work: sort every transaction, match each account to the bank statement, keep receipts, work out sales tax or GST/HST, and hand your accountant clean numbers at year-end. It's careful, repetitive work, which is exactly what software is now good at, as long as it checks itself.
What SumSwift does for $79 a month
- Reads your bank and card statements (PDF, CSV or Excel) and sorts every transaction in minutes.
- Checks every statement against your bank's printed balances, to the cent, and flags missing months.
- Asks you about anything it isn't sure of, once per merchant, and remembers your answers.
- Matches receipts you snap with your phone, tracks bills and invoices, and works out sales tax or GST/HST and what to set aside for income tax.
- Profit report, balance sheet, cash flow and a plain-English summary every month.
- A year-end package for your accountant, who gets free access to look or make fixes.
Up to 3 accounts are included; each extra account is $10 a month. Behind on your books? A catch-up of up to 12 months is $599, once.