How We Price Our Bookkeeping & Controller Services
If you've ever gotten a bookkeeping quote and thought "wait, why is this so different from what my friend down the street who owns a restaurant pays?" — you're not wrong to wonder. Pricing for accounting services isn't one-size-fits-all, and we think you deserve to know why before you ever get on a call with us.
Here's exactly what goes into it.
The short version
Your price depends on five things:
How many transactions run through your business each month
What POS and back-office tech stack you're on (we work with whatever you have — Square, Toast, Clover, Gusto, ADP, QuickBooks Online, and more)
How many locations you have
What shape your books are in right now
Which service tier fits how involved you want us to be — from clean monthly statements to payroll, bill pay, cash management, and a regular sounding board on your team
Nobody pays for bells and whistles they don't use, and nobody gets short-changed on the support they do need.
1. Transaction volume
A single-location coffee shop doing a few hundred transactions a day is a different job than a multi-unit QSR group running thousands of orders across locations. More volume means more reconciliation work, more categorization, and more places for something to go sideways — so it factors into the price.
It also depends on how you buy. An operation that works with one or two main distributors for food and beverage is a simpler bookkeeping job than an owner sourcing from many vendors and paying each bill separately.
2. Your tech stack
We're comfortable working inside whatever POS and back-office systems you're already using — Square, Toast, Clover, Gusto, ADP, QuickBooks Online, and plenty of others. You don't need to switch systems to work with us. If your systems talk to each other cleanly, that's less manual work on our end. If we're pulling reports by hand or reconciling a POS that doesn't integrate with your accounting software, that adds time — and we'll tell you upfront if that's the case, plus whether it's worth fixing before we start.
Extra systems for inventory, tip calculations or franchise reporting add another layer of complexity, which factors in too.
3. Number of locations
One location is simpler than five. Multi-unit owners need consolidated reporting, location-by-location comparisons, and often intercompany allocations. That's real, ongoing work, so it's priced accordingly — but it also means you get visibility you can't get from a single spreadsheet.
4. The current state of your books
This is the big one nobody likes to talk about. If your books are clean and current, we can start right away at our standard monthly rate. If there's a backlog — months of unreconciled transactions, missing categorization, a prior bookkeeper who left things messy — that's a one-time cleanup project priced separately from ongoing monthly service. We'll always scope this out with you before starting, so there are no surprises.
Another reality we see often: because taxes are filed on a cash basis, a lot of businesses run their day-to-day books that way too. To get real visibility into your business, we may build in some accrual accounting processes so you have real numbers to make decisions on — not just what's been deposited or paid out that month.
5. Which service tier you choose
We offer three ongoing packages, and the right one depends on how involved you want us to be:
Back-House Basics — clean monthly financial statements, tax-ready. Good if you just need the numbers done right and reviewed by your own team. (Can START at $500, with no bill pay, cash management, payroll or bank feed management.)
Menu For Success — everything in Back-House Basics, plus a monthly financial analysis email so you're not just getting numbers, you're getting context. (Can START at $650, with no bill pay, cash management, payroll or bank feed management.)
The Kitchen Sink — everything above, plus a monthly video update and a quarterly meeting where we sit down and talk through your financials and what's next for the business. This is our most hands-on tier — think of it as having a controller on your team, without the full-time salary. (Can START at $1,000 without having bill pay and payroll)
Most owners start with a gut sense of which one fits, and we're happy to help you figure out the right starting point on a free consultation — no pressure to jump straight to the top tier.
Why we don't post a flat price list
Because a single number wouldn't actually tell you anything useful. A "$600/month bookkeeping" ad doesn't know if you run one register or five, or whether your books are a mess. We'd rather have a quick conversation, understand your business, and give you a number that reflects what you actually need — not a rate that's wrong for 80% of the people who see it.
Want to learn more about pricing? Read about how we set pricing.
If you want to know what it'd look like for your business, book a free consultation and we'll walk through it together.
