How to Price Bookkeeping Services for Small, Medium, and Large Clients

At the beginning of your working relationship, there could be quite a bit of cleanup you have to do for the client’s books, and that can be time consuming. You’re also learning their business and don’t know exactly what tasks you will be doing. There can be multiple variants that play in the pricing factor. The average hourly wage for a bookkeeper in the United States is $20, but bookkeeper rates can vary from $18 to $23 per hour, dependent on education, experience, and additional skill set. Whether you need a full time or part time employee will greatly impact how you calculate labor cost.

Ever since my first bookkeeping job over the summer in 1990, I’ve been focused on helping small businesses grow by better understanding their numbers. If you post them on your site, a potential client can choose your services like they’d choose a combo at a drive-thru. For another great article about using pricing bundles, check out this post over at FinePoints Bookkeeping. Once you put together a good system, including a pricing list and some standard bundles, this is a great way to bill for your services.

By keeping track of every dollar you spend, you can gain insight into where your money is going and make informed decisions about allocating your resources. By maintaining up-to-date records, you’ll be able to make informed financial decisions and stay on top of your business’s financial health. Tracking your A/R, usually with an aging report, can help you avoid issues with collecting payments.

If needed, make adjustments to your pricing to reflect costs in your locality or state. Next, don’t refer to your pricing as a “fee” or “charging by the hour”, always refer to it as “pricing”. This is one important way to remove emotion from pricing your services. A bookkeeping checklist outlines the tasks and responsibilities you need to do regularly to keep the books up-to-date and accurate. It serves as a road map to ensure you correctly record and report all necessary financial transactions are recorded and reported correctly. Accounting and bookkeeping software can simplify managing your financial transactions—most banks allow you to download account information directly into the program.

The importance of pricing

Value pricing and bundling is an obvious strategy to boost your bottom line. The challenge though, can be persuading your clients to agree to it. Most people don’t want the most expensive option, but they also feel dissatisfied with selecting the base option because it lacks certain features.

With an hourly rate, unless you can find more hours in the day, it’s difficult—borderline impossible—to drive up profit significantly.
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This method is not based on how fast or how slow you work.
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As you can tell, how much you should charge as a bookkeeper can vary based on a lot of factors.

Employee costs like benefits, training, and time-off are important to think about when comparing an in-house bookkeeper and a financial management company. Follow the steps to confidently charge for your bookkeeping services. Consider what’s possible if you increase your revenue two to three times more without working additional hours. You end up with clients who respect and value your services.

Bookkeeping is a critical part of managing your business’s financial health. A bookkeeper records and organizes financial transactions to ensure accurate reporting of your business’s income and expenses. Bookkeeping is an essential part of running a small business.

Cash-Based Accounting

The specific amount you charge your clients for bookkeeping services will depend on your certifications, years of experience and familiarity with the client’s business. Whether you’re hiring in-house or outsourcing your bookkeeping, finding someone that has the right software tools to make finance management easy is important. Hiring an outsourced bookkeeping agency can seem overwhelming at first glance— but it can be an extremely cost-effective, simple bookkeeping for franchises solution with many benefits that can help your business grow. The cost of outsourcing your bookkeeping can differ depending on your needs. FinancePal offers package-based bookkeeping pricing options that all include a dedicated accounting team, online access and mobile application, and monthly reconciliations. Businesses that have been in operation longer, manage more employees, or are growth-driven may require more robust bookkeeping services.

Bookkeeping Training Package

Or, you can determine your prices after the work is done. Personally, I’m a huge Practice Ignition fan when it comes to quickly getting detailed, well-defined engagement letters out and for helping to automate some of your back-office processes. Again, you are trying to figure out what you think your small business client would pay. In order to help with this, Step 1 becomes incredibly important. In the conversation with your client, you’ll have to uncover and establish value with well-crafted questions.

How to Get Bookkeeping Clients When You Have No Experience

You charge this amount whether they use the hours or not. Lawyers more often use this, but bookkeepers and accountants can use this method too. Even if you switch to fixed fees or a value pricing structure for your main bookkeeping services, you may have additional services that command a premium. It’s called the Simple Pricing System, and it’s available in the 5MB Academy. Accountants provide a higher level of financial analysis and planning. They may use the financial data bookkeepers generate to advise business owners on tax planning and budgeting.

Overall stats of a large client

Business Success Solution aims to empower accounting professionals to take charge of their business and double revenues while working half the time. Reanna initially worked with any client who was willing to pay her fees. Because she was service-oriented and wanted to please her clients, she let them dictate the processes.

Basic Bookkeeping Costs

It’s hard to know how much time a job will take you until you’re in it. Once I’ve spent some time in their books, I usually like to transition to the next method. Take a look at my recommendation for the 5 best books for accounting firms looking to modernize and stay ahead of the curve. Whether you use Practice Ignition or not, you’ll need some way of cementing the fixed price per month agreement. You should not deliver an upfront fixed price unless your average cost is known. Thanks to some of the marketing for accountants strategies you’ve leveraged, you’re now ready to chat with a prospective client.

Many businesses are concerned about switching over to outsourcing, not understanding how the pieces fit together with this model. But with today’s advancements in technology, outsourcing has never been easier. Outsourcing can provide advanced and less costly bookkeeping service than a typical in-house bookkeeper.