How much does outsourced accounting cost?

Why nobody publishes one price

It isn’t evasiveness. It’s that “outsourced accounting” describes work that can differ by an order of magnitude between two businesses with identical revenue. A consulting firm with one bank account and thirty invoices a month is not the same engagement as a restaurant group with four locations, daily deposits, tip reporting and vendor invoices arriving by the dozen — even if both do the same annual sales.

Revenue, in fact, is one of the weaker predictors of accounting cost. What actually drives the work is volume and complexity. Any firm that quotes you before understanding those is guessing, and you’ll find out which direction they guessed within a few months.

The five things that actually drive your price

1. Transaction volume

This is the biggest single factor. Every bank line, credit-card charge, invoice, bill, deposit and payroll run has to be recorded, categorized and reconciled. A business with a few hundred monthly transactions and one with a few thousand are simply different amounts of work. If you want the fastest possible estimate of your own complexity, count the transactions across all your accounts last month.

2. Number of accounts and entities

Each bank account, credit card, merchant processor, loan and payment platform is another feed to reconcile. Multiple legal entities multiply that again — separate books, separate statements, and intercompany transactions that have to be matched and eliminated. Real estate owners with an LLC per property feel this most; the entity count often matters more than the size of any one property.

3. The state of your books today

An engagement that starts from a clean, reconciled trial balance costs less to run than one that starts from eighteen months of unreconciled activity. That’s not a judgment — plenty of good businesses have messy books, usually because they outgrew whoever was doing them. But cleanup is real work, and it’s honest to price it separately from the ongoing monthly engagement rather than quietly bury it.

4. What services are included

“Accounting” can mean anything from transaction categorization to a full finance department. Each layer adds cost: bookkeeping alone; bookkeeping plus a controller’s review; adding accounts-payable processing or payroll administration; adding sales-tax filings; adding tax preparation and planning; adding forecasting and CFO-level advisory. Two quotes can differ by half simply because one includes three layers the other doesn’t.

5. Industry complexity

Some industries carry accounting requirements that others never touch. Inventory and cost of goods sold. Job costing with work in progress. Restricted funds and grant reporting for nonprofits. Multi-state sales tax for e-commerce. Trust or escrow accounts. Percentage-of-completion revenue. These require both more hours and more senior judgment, and they legitimately move the price.

Hourly vs. flat monthly — and why it matters more than the rate

The pricing model shapes the whole relationship. Compare the incentives honestly:

	Hourly	Flat monthly
What you know upfront	A rate, not a total	The total
Who carries the risk of a hard month	You	The firm
Incentive to be efficient	Works against the firm	Works with the firm
Cost of asking a question	Billable — so you hesitate	Included — so you call
Budgeting	Unpredictable line item	Fixed line item

That fourth row is the one clients feel most. Under an hourly arrangement, every phone call has a meter running, so owners stop asking — and the questions they stop asking are exactly the ones worth asking. A flat monthly fee removes that friction. It also means efficiency gains benefit both sides: when a firm automates part of your workflow, an hourly model punishes them for it.

Under hourly billing, the client pays for the firm’s learning curve. Under a flat fee, the firm owns it.

The one place hourly is genuinely appropriate is a defined cleanup project where nobody can know the scope until they’re inside the file — and even then, you should get a cap or a staged estimate.

What makes a quote go up or down

Some of these are within your control, which is worth knowing before you shop.

• Down: fewer bank and card accounts; consolidating personal spending out of business accounts; connected bank feeds instead of paper statements; consistent documentation; current, reconciled books at the start.
• Down: a standard software setup the firm already knows well, rather than a heavily customized or obscure system.
• Up: multiple entities; multi-state filings; inventory; job costing; heavy payroll complexity; investor or board reporting packages.
• Up: weekly rather than monthly reporting cadence; AP approval workflows; anything requiring same-week turnaround.
• Up: historical cleanup — though this is usually one-time, not permanent.

How to compare two quotes apples-to-apples

Two proposals with different numbers on the bottom line are almost never describing the same work. Before you compare price, get both firms to answer these:

• Is there a review layer, and who performs it? Ask directly whether a controller or senior accountant reviews the close before it reaches you, or whether one bookkeeper’s work goes out unchecked. This is the single biggest quality difference between two otherwise similar quotes.
• What deliverables do I receive, and when? A categorized ledger is not the same as a reconciled close with a P&L, balance sheet and cash-flow statement delivered by a stated date each month.
• Who answers my questions, and is that billable? Will you reach the person who knows your file, or a rotating queue? Is a fifteen-minute call included?
• What’s explicitly excluded? Payroll? Sales-tax filings? 1099s? Year-end tax work? Cleanup of prior periods? Exclusions are where a low quote becomes an average one.
• What happens when my volume grows? How and when is the fee revisited — and will you get notice, or a surprise invoice?
• What’s the cancellation term? A firm confident in its work doesn’t need to lock you in for years.

Write the answers in two columns. In our experience most “expensive” quotes stop looking expensive once the exclusions column is filled in.

Red flags

• A quote that’s dramatically below everyone else. Accounting is skilled labor; it has a floor. A price well under it usually means one of three things — the work is being done by someone underqualified, there’s no review layer, or the scope is much narrower than you assumed.
• Open-ended hourly cleanup with no cap and no estimate. “We’ll see how it goes” is not a scope. Ask for a not-to-exceed figure or a staged approach with a checkpoint.
• No review layer at all. If nobody senior reviews the work, you’re buying data entry and calling it accounting.
• A quote given before anyone looked at your books. A number produced from a two-minute form will get revised — and revisions only ever go one direction.
• Vagueness about who actually does the work. You’re entitled to know the qualifications of the person in your file.
• Long lock-in with early-termination penalties. Ask why the term needs to be that long.

How we price at Duban

We quote a flat monthly fee after a consultation — never before. In that conversation we look at the things listed above: how many transactions and accounts you have, how many entities, what shape the books are in today, which services you need, and what your industry requires. Then we give you one number for the ongoing engagement, and if cleanup is needed, a separate scoped figure for that, so you can see exactly what’s one-time and what’s recurring.

What’s always included, at every level: a bookkeeper who passed the Duban Skills Test — which only 15% of candidates clear, and every candidate already holds a QuickBooks ProAdvisor certification and an accounting degree before sitting for it — and a controller’s review of every close. We don’t sell oversight as an upgrade, because books nobody reviewed aren’t finished books. You can see what the ongoing work covers on our bookkeeping services page.

The point of quoting this way is simple: you know the cost before we start, and it doesn’t move because a month got busy.

Getting your own number

The fastest path to an accurate quote is a short call where we ask about volume, accounts, entities and the current state of your records. If it turns out you need less than you think, we’ll say so — and if what you need is outside what we do well, we’ll point you somewhere better. Book a free consultation and we’ll get you a real number instead of a range.