How much does a bookkeeper cost? Hourly rates, fixed fees, and the numbers most firms will not publish

Ask a bookkeeping firm what it charges and you will usually get the same answer: it depends, book a call. It does depend - but that is a reason to explain the pricing, not to hide it. We publish our numbers, so this article can do something most cannot: tell you what bookkeeping actually costs, with real figures attached.

The short answer

• Hourly bookkeepers price the hour, not the outcome. The spread is wide - experience, qualifications and BAS agent registration all move it - and the number you actually need is rate times hours, which is exactly what an hourly quote never tells you.
• Fixed-fee bookkeeping for a small business generally runs from a few hundred dollars a month to $2,000 or more, driven almost entirely by transaction volume, payroll and complexity.
• Our numbers: Basic Books, our entry package for simple businesses, is from $80 a week (about $347 a month). Full-service bookkeeping with a dedicated bookkeeper starts at $350 a month for a small file and runs to around $2,300 a month for a high-volume file worked weekly - the complete table is on our fees page, along with an estimator that gives you a range in thirty seconds without asking for your email address.

Why the hourly rate is the wrong question

"Bookkeeper hourly rate" is what everyone searches for, so here is the honest problem with it: an hourly rate tells you the price of an hour, not the price of your books. The number you actually need is rate multiplied by hours, and the hours are the part nobody quotes.

A cheaper bookkeeper who takes ten hours costs more than a dearer one who takes six - and you have no way of knowing in advance which one you are hiring. Worse, the incentive runs the wrong way. Hourly billing rewards slow work and punishes you for asking questions, because every phone call is on the meter. The predictable result is that clients stop calling their bookkeeper, which is exactly when small problems get time to become expensive ones.

Hourly billing has a legitimate home: one-off, hard-to-scope work, like untangling several years of neglected accounts. For the ongoing monthly job, it mostly survives because it lets firms avoid committing to a number.

Why fixed fees win - for both sides

A fixed monthly fee means you know the cost before the work starts, it never spikes because a quarter got messy, and calls are never charged - so you actually make them. That is the client side.

The provider side matters just as much, because it explains why the arrangement holds up. A fixed fee makes efficiency the bookkeeper's problem, in a good way: the incentive is to set the file up properly, automate what should be automated and keep it clean, because rework comes out of their margin rather than your pocket. Hourly billing pays for mess. Fixed fees pay for systems.

The honest fine print is that a fixed fee needs a defined scope. If the price is fixed but nobody wrote down what it covers, it is not really fixed - it is an argument scheduled for later. Everything in scope should be in writing before you commit, and a change in the business should trigger a re-scope conversation, not a silent price rise.

What actually drives the price

Bookkeeping is priced on workload, and workload has surprisingly little to do with turnover. These are the real inputs - the same ones our own quoting is built from:

• Transaction volume. The single biggest driver. Every line on the bank statement has to be coded and reconciled, so a business with 1,000 transactions a month is a genuinely different job from one with 80 - regardless of which one turns over more.
• How often the file is touched. Weekly attention costs more than monthly, but not proportionally - a file kept current weekly is faster per pass than one reconstructed monthly.
• Payroll. Priced on people and rhythm, not revenue: how many employees, how often they are paid, and whether they are salaried or on timesheets. Timesheets roughly double the processing of a pay run. Payday super has raised the stakes here - super now moves with every pay run, so payroll accuracy is a weekly discipline rather than a quarterly one.
• Extra entities. A trust or second company is not a footnote - it is another file, another reconciliation and another BAS.
• Complexity. Stock, point-of-sale feeds, online marketplaces, foreign currency and job tracking each make the same transaction count harder to reconcile.
• Scope beyond the books. Paying your bills, raising your invoices and chasing your debtors are add-ons, priced as such.
• BAS lodgement. Preparing and lodging your BAS is regulated work that only a registered BAS or tax agent can legally charge for, and it is usually built into the monthly fee.
• Catch-up. A backlog is the one thing that should never be in the monthly price. Done properly it is quoted separately as a fixed one-off after someone has seen the file, so the clean-up never becomes an open-ended bill. That is its own service.

When a quote arrives without anyone asking about most of that list, the number is a guess - and guesses get corrected later, in one direction.

What LINK Books charges

Two published price points, because businesses come in two broad shapes:

Basic Books - from $80 a week. For sole operators only, and deliberately narrow: monthly coding and reconciliations, quarterly BAS lodged by a registered BAS agent, and monthly profit and loss reporting. No payroll, no bill paying, up to about 150 transactions a month, and your Xero subscription on top at Xero's own price. The full criteria are published on the page - which we would argue is the more useful list.

Full-service bookkeeping - from $350 a month. A dedicated bookkeeper on your file at the rhythm you choose. Indicatively, with quarterly BAS and a small salaried payroll included: a file under 100 transactions a month runs $350 to $500 depending on frequency; 250 to 500 transactions runs roughly $650 to $1,175; a high-volume file at 1,000-plus transactions worked weekly runs $1,725 to $2,300. The full table and the estimator are on the fees page - the estimator uses the same line items we quote with, and it will tell you plainly if Basic Books is the better fit rather than quoting you the bigger service.

Not in the monthly fee, deliberately: software subscriptions (Xero is passed through at its own price, not marked up), and catch-up work, which is always a separate fixed quote. The exact monthly figure is confirmed after a free look at your file, and once agreed it only changes by agreement - if the business grows, we re-scope together before anything moves.

What a cheap bookkeeper actually costs

There is always a cheaper number available, and it is worth understanding where the money goes instead of away.

• Your accountant redoes the work at year end - at tax accountant rates. Coding done at speed with no query list means expenses land wherever looks close, and someone senior gets paid to unpick it in July.
• GST gets claimed wrongly in both directions. Credits missed on real expenses cost you cash quietly. Credits claimed on things that never carried GST - wages, most bank fees, unregistered suppliers - overstate your refund until the ATO notices, and then there are amendments and interest.
• Payroll errors compound. A wrong rate or a missed entitlement is not one error - it repeats every pay run until found, and the fix is back pay with super recalculated on it, under rules that now treat underpayment far more seriously than they used to.
• The BAS may not be legal. Only a registered BAS or tax agent can lawfully charge to prepare and lodge your BAS. A cheap bookkeeper who "does the BAS" without registration is a red flag you can check in two minutes on the Tax Practitioners Board register - our registration is published here.
• Eventually, someone pays for catch-up anyway. A large share of our catch-up work arrives from businesses that had a bookkeeper the whole time. The cheap years were not free - they were a loan.

Three questions that sort any quote

1. What is excluded? A fixed price with nothing excluded is not a real price. The provider who tells you plainly what is out of scope is the one whose number will still be true in a year.
2. Who lodges the BAS, and what is their agent number? Then check it on the TPB register. Two minutes, and it filters more of the market than you would hope.
3. What happens when we grow? The answer should be a re-scope conversation with a new agreed fee - not silent absorption followed by a surprise, and not an hourly meter quietly switching on.

Get your number without talking to anyone

If your business is simple - one entity, no staff or just a couple, modest volume - start at Basic Books, from $80 a week. For everything else, the fee estimator gives you an indicative monthly range in thirty seconds: no email address, no follow-up call, the same maths we quote with. When you want the exact figure, a free health check of your file is what confirms it - quoted on your reality, not on averages.

Figures current as at the date above and ex-GST. Your fixed fee is always confirmed against your actual file before anything starts.