Is $300 a month reasonable for monthly bookkeeping?
The number alone doesn't tell you much. What matters is what's actually happening behind it — who's doing the work, and how often.
Monthly bookkeeping pricing is all over the map — anywhere from under $100/month to $800 or more — and the number by itself doesn't tell you whether you're getting a good deal. $300/month, which is where my own pricing starts, sits in a pretty reasonable middle ground for a small business with normal transaction volume. Whether that's a fair price for you depends less on the number and more on what's actually behind it.
Why the cheap end is cheap
Bookkeeping under $100–150/month is usually software-driven categorization with light human review, not a person actually reconciling your accounts and looking for what's wrong. That can work fine for a very simple business with almost no transactions. It tends to fall apart the moment your books have any real complexity — multiple accounts, inventory, contractors, a property or two — because nobody's actually looking closely enough to catch the mistakes.
Why the expensive end is expensive
On the other side, bookkeeping bundled inside a CPA or tax firm often costs more per month than a dedicated bookkeeper — partly because you're paying overhead for a practice built around tax season, not monthly work. More expensive doesn't automatically mean more attention; sometimes it means the opposite, since bookkeeping is the side service there, not the focus. See why that structural difference matters.
What actually determines a fair price
- How many accounts and transactions get reconciled each month
- Whether a real person is doing the reconciling, not just approving what software auto-categorized
- Whether you get an actual report you can read, not just a login to software
- Whether the price is flat and predictable, or an hourly bill that varies every month
The number alone tells you nothing. Ask what's actually included.
My own monthly bookkeeping starts at $300/month: real reconciliation, books closed by the 15th, and a plain-English report — done by me, not handed off. See the full pricing breakdown for what's included at each level.
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