Look for a bookkeeping price and the services page will not have one. Ask outright and the answer often comes back as “it depends,” or as a request for a call. That is hard to budget around, and it can look like the figure is being kept back on purpose.
It usually isn’t. The price really does change from one business to the next, sometimes by a lot. But “it depends” is only a fair answer if somebody tells you what it depends on. Here is what actually sets your number, what the three ways of charging do to your bill, and how to ask for a quote that comes back as a real one.
What actually moves your number
Five things:
- How many transactions you have. A consultant with forty charges a month and a restaurant with two thousand aren’t the same job, even though both of them are “small.” You can get a rough feel for your own volume by looking at a month across all your accounts, not just the main one. Treat it as approximate: transfers between your own accounts show up on both sides, and one deposit can cover many sales.
- How many accounts have to be reconciled. Every checking account, savings account, credit card, loan, and payment processor is a separate record that has to be matched to the books each month. Four accounts make for a different month than eleven.
- Whether payroll is in scope. Payroll brings its own filings, deadlines, and contractor records. It’s normal to price it separately, and you should ask whether a quoted figure includes it.
- How far behind you are. Current books are maintenance. Books that stopped in March are a project first and maintenance afterward, and those two get quoted differently. Nobody is grading you on this one. Books fall behind for all sorts of reasons and most of them are nobody’s fault, so when we look at a file we are working out how long it will take, not how it got that way.
- How clean the records are. Records are quick to work with when the bank connection is feeding transactions in cleanly and the receipts sit in one place. It takes longer when personal and business spending run through the same card or when nothing has been categorized since setup. Untangling a file like that takes longer than keeping it going afterward.
The three ways bookkeepers charge
Once you know what drives the work, the billing method decides how that work reaches your invoice. There are three in common use.
By the hour. You’re billed for time spent. There is a public figure to anchor this one: the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the 2025 median for the occupation it calls bookkeeping, accounting, and auditing clerks at $24.36 an hour. That is what bookkeepers are paid as employees. It is not what a service charges, and the two are not the same question, so treat it as a floor to reason from rather than a rate to expect. Hourly suits genuinely occasional work, a question here and a fix there, where nobody can say in advance how much there will be. The catch is that it prices the clock rather than the result, so the same books cost you more in a month the work happens to take longer, and the total is harder to plan around. If you’re quoted hourly for ongoing monthly work, ask for an estimated range and what would push it past that.
A flat monthly fee. One agreed number each month for an agreed list of work. What a flat fee buys you is a number you can plan around. What it asks of you is attention to the scope, because the fee only means something if you know what’s inside it. Get the list in writing, and ask what happens in a month that runs heavy.
Per project, quoted up front. This is how defined pieces of work are usually handled: catching up a year of records, cleaning up a file that was set up wrong, or moving from one system to another. The work has edges, so it can be looked at and priced before it starts. If you’re behind, ask for this quote before you ask about a monthly fee.
How to get a quote that is a real quote
A quote can only be as specific as the information behind it, and most of that is in your hands. Send your transaction count for a normal month, the number of accounts that need reconciling, whether payroll is involved, the last month your books were current, and which software you use. That is usually the difference between a generic answer and somebody engaging with your actual situation.
Then ask four things about whatever comes back:
- What is included, item by item? “Monthly bookkeeping” means different things at different firms. Reconciliation, categorization, and a set of monthly reports are the usual core. Payroll, sales tax, and bill paying often aren’t.
- What would change this number? A good answer names the trigger, such as a jump in transaction volume or adding an account, rather than leaving it open.
- Is getting current priced separately from staying current? If you’re behind, these are two jobs, and a single blended number hides which of the two your money is buying.
- What do I get each month, and when does it arrive? A date and a named set of reports is an answer. “We’ll keep you updated” isn’t.
How somebody answers those four is a fair preview of how they’ll communicate once you’re a client, which for a relationship this close to your business matters about as much as the fee does. If you’re still weighing whether to hire at all or keep doing the books yourself, that decision is worth working through alongside this one.
How Coastal prices it
Monthly work is priced as a package with a base price, then customized so you only pay for what you use. The packages are built around the first two things on the list above: how many bank and credit card accounts you have, and how many transactions run through them. Payroll, sales tax, and accounts payable and receivable are add-ons rather than assumptions.
Catch-up and clean-up are quoted separately from the monthly number, so you can see what getting current costs before you decide what to commit to each month. In most cases we can give you a flat rate up front, so you know the cost before we start.
Coastal handles the bookkeeping. Your CPA handles the taxes. Sales tax is the one that trips people up, so it is worth being exact: Coastal prepares and files your sales tax returns as part of the bookkeeping, and questions about what is taxable or where you are required to collect are tax questions for your CPA.
Send us those details and we will come back with a quote for your situation. E-mail sms@coastalbookkeepingllc.com or request a quote.
—