- Billing by the hour suits a one-off catch-up on old books and works against you on anything ongoing, because tidy books mean fewer hours for whoever is keeping them.
- Two bookkeeping quotes at the same price can cover very different amounts of work, which is why the same five questions have to go to every firm you ask.
- A bookkeeper of your own in the United States costs about $72,360 a year all in, well above the $50,670 the published median wage shows.
- A dedicated bookkeeper placed through Remote Hero starts at $2,000 a month, works your own hours, and the arrangement runs month to month.
Step one: what outsourced bookkeeping rates are built from
A firm quoting you has never seen your business, so every quote starts with the same handful of questions. Those answers set your price.
Four things set an outsourced bookkeeping rate: how many bank and card accounts have to be matched against their statements each month, how many transactions run through them, whether payroll goes through the books, and how many months are behind.
- Those two counts are the work. Every transaction gets put in a category, and every account gets checked line by line against its statement. A business with 4 accounts and 60 transactions a month is not the same job as one with 12 accounts and 600.
- Payroll in the books moves you up a tier at most firms. Wages, the tax withheld and any benefits all get recorded separately, rather than as one payment leaving the account.
- Months behind are a separate job with a separate price. Nobody can quote that job until somebody has opened the old books and looked, and it is normally paid before the monthly fee starts.
Where that comes from: every bookkeeping quote opens with those four questions, and you can answer all four yourself. Answer them honestly, because nobody can price a month of work on a guess. Now you know what moves the number. You still do not have the four answers.
Step two: count these four before you call anybody
Here is how to get each of the four. Counting them takes an evening at most, and you only have to do it once.
Open your online banking and count every account the business uses, checking accounts and credit cards both. Each one gets checked against its own statement every month, so each one is work. Then take one ordinary month's statement for your busiest account and count the lines on it. That is close enough. Nobody needs an exact figure, they only need to know whether you are a sixty-transaction business or a six-hundred one.
Payroll is a yes or a no, and it is worth being precise about what you mean by it. Paying yourself out of the business account is not payroll. Running wages through a payroll service, with tax withheld and filings going out, is. People round the fourth number down. Say how far back the books were last checked against the bank. If you do not know, say that, and a firm will price a look before it prices a month.
With those four written down you can ask anybody for a real price. Next you ask them, and it is the same five questions every time.
Step three: ask every firm the same five questions
Ask these five in these words, and write each answer down beside the price it came with.
| Ask this | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| How many accounts does this fee cover? | The fee is priced per account, so this is the first thing that changes it when you open another one. |
| What is included, and what gets billed on top of it? | Two fees at the same price often cover different work. That answer tells you which is which. |
| Who will be doing my books, and will it be the same person next quarter? | A named person who stays is worth paying for. A rotating queue means you explain your business again every few months. |
| What happens to this fee if my transactions double? | This tells you whether the price you agree today is the price you pay next year. |
| Which day of the month do I get my reports? | A firm with a process names a day. One that will not name a day has no process. |
How many accounts does this fee cover?
- Why it matters
- The fee is priced per account, so this is the first thing that changes it when you open another one.
What is included, and what gets billed on top of it?
- Why it matters
- Two fees at the same price often cover different work. That answer tells you which is which.
Who will be doing my books, and will it be the same person next quarter?
- Why it matters
- A named person who stays is worth paying for. A rotating queue means you explain your business again every few months.
What happens to this fee if my transactions double?
- Why it matters
- This tells you whether the price you agree today is the price you pay next year.
Which day of the month do I get my reports?
- Why it matters
- A firm with a process names a day. One that will not name a day has no process.
Send the same five to every firm you talk to, including the one you already use. A firm that answers all five in writing has a process, whatever the price turns out to be. Now the quotes come back, and step four is reading them, because a lot of the work sits outside the monthly fee, and people do not expect that.
Step four: read the quote, the fee and what sits outside it
A monthly bookkeeping fee covers the work that repeats, and almost nothing else. Checking the accounts against their statements, putting the transactions into categories, and a set of reports at the end of the month are in it. Setting up new accounting software, filing sales tax and running payroll are usually quoted on top, because none of them happens every month.
Firms also differ in how they work out the bill, and four ways cover nearly everything you will be offered. A flat monthly fee is the common one. It is the same number every month, which you can budget for, as long as you know the list of work it covers. Billing by the hour is right for a one-off catch-up, where nobody can price the job before opening the books. It is wrong for ongoing work, because tidy books mean fewer hours, and you do not want anybody's income to depend on yours staying messy. Billing per transaction follows your activity honestly and gets expensive as you grow. The fourth way is a firm looking at your business and naming a figure. That usually works out near a flat monthly fee, so ask what it was based on.
Four ways of billing, and four different lists of work behind them. You can now tell which quote is really cheaper. You still cannot tell whether any of them beats hiring somebody yourself. That is step five.
Step five: compare it against a bookkeeper of your own
Hire a bookkeeper yourself and the price stops being about your transaction count at all. You pay a wage, and then you pay everything that sits on top of a wage, and people leave that second part out when they compare the two routes.
Here is how it adds up. O*NET publishes the Bureau of Labor Statistics median for bookkeeping, accounting and auditing clerks: $24.36 an hour, or $50,670 a year, in 2025. That is the wage on its own. Then your share of the payroll tax goes on top: the IRS puts the employer's Social Security at 6.2 percent and Medicare at 1.45 percent, with federal unemployment tax after that. Then add health insurance, paid time off, a laptop and the accounting software. Those extras come to about three in every ten dollars the seat costs you. That puts a US bookkeeper at roughly $72,360 a year. Our salary guide prices every role we place the same way.
A bookkeeper placed through Remote Hero starts at $2,000 a month for somebody with up to two years behind them, and runs to $2,950 for somebody who has led the work. That price is all in, and it never goes through your own payroll, so there is no company to open abroad and no second set of filings to learn.
Nobody in that comparison is being paid less than the work is worth. A bookkeeper in Colombia or Mexico is paid what their experience is worth where they live. We take a smaller cut of it than most firms do, because we make our money on placements that last rather than on replacing people. You also stop paying for a US payroll: the taxes above, the benefits and the searching it took to fill the seat. Our savings calculator runs the same sum for whichever seat you are filling.
What you get when we place a bookkeeper
If you decide this work belongs to a person rather than a package, here is what comes with it. You get one virtual bookkeeper who works only for you, online through your own working day. Ask a question in the morning and you get the answer that morning, not overnight.
A resume will not tell you whether somebody has really done the work, so we check. A month-end close is the tidy-up that turns a month of transactions into the reports you read. A candidate who can walk you through a close they ran, day by day, has really run one. Somebody who talks about bookkeeping in general terms has probably only helped with it. We put your accounting software in the brief as well, because QuickBooks and NetSuite are different jobs in practice.
You sign one agreement with us and we pay the contractor. The arrangement runs month to month, so you can stop at the end of any month, and there is a buyout if you later want that person on your own payroll. If communication breaks down on either side, we step in. Somebody who hires directly has nobody to do that. If you would rather own the hire outright from day one, direct hire is the other route.
You still do the teaching. Expect about two weeks of ramp, which is the time before a new bookkeeper is any use to you. The person they report to should plan on spending it handing over context, expectations and system access. People underestimate that more than anything else on a first remote hire.
Still deciding between a bookkeeping firm and a bookkeeper of your own?
Tell us what your books look like in a normal month and I will say which of the two fits. We send vetted candidates in 2 to 4 weeks, at 50 to 70 percent under a US hire. If a monthly package is the better answer at your size, I will say so on the call rather than sell you a person. Explore your options with us.
