How To Charge For Bookkeeping Services
It means you set a fee for each service you offer and provide clients with a ‘menu’ of sorts, with corresponding prices. You must understand what bookkeeping services you need and whether it’s best to hire a professional bookkeeper full time, part time, or outsource the service. As the business owner, you’d be willing to pay more for those insights 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. Accountants maintain a wide range of skill sets, including managing spending and budgets, taxes, and analysis of financial statements. To be exceptional at these tasks, accountants must complete years of training and earn special certifications, which their salaries reflect.
- You can also book a call with your bookkeeper (or send them a message) whenever you’d like.
- With an hourly rate, unless you can find more hours in the day, it’s difficult—borderline impossible—to drive up profit significantly.
- The best approach to bookkeeping is to translate the work of keeping your financial records and books in order into dollars.
- All bookkeepers provide a certain set of tasks, so it’s hard to charge a premium for something other bookkeepers are also offering.
- I often just use the bill pay directly through the bank with this client, as it’s relatively easy to do, and many banks will do that service for free.
Full-time bookkeepers keep track of all day-to-day operations, financial reporting, cash flow, tax filing, credit card accounts, customer invoices, monthly transactions, and much more. You can also book a call with your bookkeeper (or send them a message) whenever you’d like. There’s no extra fee or hourly charges for support—we’re always happy to nerd out about bookkeeping and your financial statements. One common mistake firms make as they’re thinking about pricing is failing to account for all of their costs.
questions to ask yourself before hiring a bookkeeper
The difference in pricing often depends on factors like the number of services included, the complexity of the work, and the value provided to clients. A big tip, if you’re going to any type of non-hourly billing, is to work out a price list for your services. This can be something you share or even display on your website, but it doesn’t have to be. The important part is to figure out what services you provide and how much you want to charge for them. It’s a silly hangup, but I always want to find a way to skip past my hourly rate or the total cost of my first invoice and get straight to the work. The thing you forget when you go out on your own is you’ve now got several bosses.
However, any error or oversight that may appear on the sheet is fully at your business’s expense. We can fully wipe your data, too—at the end of the day, it’s your info and your call. Lessons learned on how top firms grow fast, build stronger teams, and increase profit while working less. You’ll have access to all the templates, scripts, and frameworks you need to fine-tune your pricing strategy from start to finish. Using this information, you want to guess at the highest price you think they’re willing to pay for each service level.
What is a full charge bookkeeper?
But who wants the task of sifting through receipts proposed changes to the fair labor standards act and organizing statements when there’s a whole slew of business operations to attend to? It may be time for you to make the executive decision of hiring a bookkeeper to take the reins. You may also consider throwing in other costs, like a fee for an initial consult, to your pricing structure. Many clients may be willing to pay a little more in exchange for trustworthy knowledge and training. I tried using bill.com with this particular client, but I actually didn’t really find it as helpful as I would have hoped. I often just use the bill pay directly through the bank with this client, as it’s relatively easy to do, and many banks will do that service for free.
How to package your bookkeeping services as a small business
On the other hand, there are times you can charge a much higher hourly rate. They will appreciate the work you do, and some will even tell you so. There just seems to be a visceral objection to paying for things that don’t directly improve sales. I’ve got many stories to illustrate my point, and some even involve family. Look at the types of services you offer and compare what you currently charge to others.
For example, in Massachusetts, in-house bookkeepers earn 20% more than the national average, whereas in Kentucky, they earn 22% less than the national average. Small businesses are most often prone to outsourcing their bookkeeping to third parties. On paper, a part time bookkeeper may look like an attractive option.
