Every week someone calls me with some version of the same question: what does a bookkeeper actually cost? Usually they've already looked online and found numbers from $125 a month to $2,000 a month, and the range is so wide it's useless. So here's the honest breakdown for the Denver metro, including what I charge, what the national companies charge, and how to tell which one you need.
The short answer
For a small business in the Denver area with one or two bank accounts, a credit card, and a few hundred transactions a month, you should expect to pay somewhere between $300 and $600 a month for a real bookkeeper who reconciles your accounts and gives you monthly reports. Less than that and something is being skipped. More than that and you either have a complex business, you're paying for tax prep bundled in, or you're paying a firm's overhead.
The four ways people pay for bookkeeping
Hourly. A freelance bookkeeper in Colorado typically charges $40 to $80 an hour. A simple business takes four to eight hours a month, so you land around $250 to $500. The problem with hourly is that you never know what the bill will be, and the bookkeeper has no incentive to be fast. I stopped billing hourly years ago for exactly that reason.
Flat monthly rate from a local bookkeeper. This is what I do and what most of the independent bookkeepers around Westminster, Arvada, and Broomfield do. You pay one price every month based on your transaction volume and complexity. My monthly bookkeeping starts at $300, and most of my clients fall between $300 and $500. That covers categorizing every transaction, reconciling every account to the bank statement, recording payroll, and sending you a profit and loss, balance sheet, and cash flow report each month. You can see my actual pricing packages here.
National online bookkeeping services. These are the companies that show up in ads when you search "bookkeeper near me." Prices run from about $125 a month on the low end to $300 to $900 a month for the better known ones, and they usually tier by your monthly expenses. The low end is almost always a reduced service: cash basis only, no payroll entries, no job costing, and a support queue instead of a person. The higher tiers are competitive with local pricing, but you'll typically be assigned to a team rather than one bookkeeper, and nobody on that team knows that Westminster collects its own sales tax or what Colorado FAMLI is.
In-house bookkeeper. A full time bookkeeper in the Denver metro costs roughly $50,000 to $60,000 a year in salary, plus payroll taxes, benefits, software, and a desk. That makes sense once you have enough volume to fill 40 hours a week, which for most trades and service businesses means several million in revenue and a crew of 15 or more. Below that, you're paying someone to do bookkeeping ten hours a week and find things to do the other thirty.
What actually drives the price up or down
Transaction volume is the biggest factor. A plumbing company running 400 transactions a month through two bank accounts and three credit cards is more work than a consultant with 60 transactions in one checking account, and it should cost more.
Number of accounts matters almost as much. Every bank account, credit card, loan, and merchant account has to be reconciled separately every month.
Payroll adds work. If you run payroll through Gusto, ADP, Paychex, or a local provider, someone has to record each payroll run in QuickBooks so your labor costs and liabilities show up correctly. That's included in my monthly rate. Some bookkeepers charge extra for it, and most of the national services skip it entirely.
Job costing is a trades thing. If you want to know which jobs made money, your bookkeeper has to tag every material purchase, subcontractor payment, and labor hour to a project. It takes more time and it's worth every dollar if you're a contractor, but a bookkeeper who's never done it will quote you a general rate and then fall behind.
Cleanup is separate. If your books are months behind or your QuickBooks file is a mess, that gets fixed first as a one time project, priced on how far back it goes. I quote it flat after looking at your file so there are no surprises. Then the monthly rate starts once you're current.
What you should get for $300 to $500 a month
Every transaction categorized correctly, not dumped in "Uncategorized Expense." Every account reconciled to the statement, to the penny. Payroll recorded every pay period. A profit and loss, balance sheet, and cash flow report every month, plus a short note explaining what changed. Questions answered within a business day by the same person who does the work. And a QuickBooks file your tax preparer can use without sending you a list of 40 questions in March.
If you're paying in that range and not getting all of that, you're overpaying, no matter what the number is.
When cheap bookkeeping costs more
I take over a lot of files from $125 a month services and from owners doing it themselves. The common pattern is that the reconciliations were never actually done, so the bank balance in QuickBooks drifted from the real one, sometimes by thousands. Loan payments got booked as expenses. Owner draws got booked as payroll. Sales tax got collected and never tracked. None of it shows up until the CPA opens the file in February and the cleanup bill is bigger than a year of proper bookkeeping would have been.
The cheapest bookkeeping is the kind you only pay for once.
What I'd tell a friend
If you're under about $100,000 a year in revenue and your books are simple, QuickBooks Online plus an hour a month of your own time is fine. Once you have employees, subcontractors, multiple accounts, or you're in the trades, hire a flat rate bookkeeper who works in your industry and lives close enough to meet for coffee. In the Denver metro that's going to cost $300 to $600 a month, and it should feel like the best money you spend on the business.
If you want to know what your specific business would cost, book a free 30 minute call. I'll look at your QuickBooks, tell you where things stand, and give you a flat number. No pressure and no contract.