True Cost of DIY Bookkeeping

Small business bookkeeping generally runs a few hundred dollars a month at the low end for simple, low-volume books, and rises with transaction volume, the number of bank and card accounts, payroll, and whether job costing or inventory is involved. Our pricing benchmark resource breaks the ranges down in detail.

Only if your time has low alternative value and your books are simple. Once you factor in the hours, the annual cleanup, and the deductions that go unclaimed, most owners billing $100 an hour or more find DIY costs more than professional help.

Five to ten hours a month for a simple service business with one bank account and low volume; fifteen to thirty for a business with payroll, multiple accounts, inventory, or job costing. Add several days at year end for cleanup and tax preparation.

Mixing personal and business spending, recording loan payments entirely as expense instead of splitting principal and interest, leaving accounts unreconciled for months, misclassifying contractors, and coding direct costs to overhead so margin looks better than it is.

Software records transactions; it does not decide whether they are recorded correctly. Bank feeds guess at categories, and those guesses become your financial statements. Someone needs to reconcile the accounts and review the coding, whether that is you or a professional.