Comparing Bookkeeping Quotes: The Eight Questions That Matter

Two bookkeeping quotes land in your inbox in the same week. Both say monthly bookkeeping, both say GST-ready, both say dedicated accountant. One is roughly three times the other. Nothing in either document tells you why, because the words are identical and the work behind them is not.

That gap is almost never dishonesty. It is scope — what counts as a transaction, who reconciles the bank, how many entities are in the fee, what arrives at month end and on which date. Price without scope is not a price. This piece is the list of questions that turns three incomparable quotes into a decision you can defend, plus an honest version of the in-house comparison most people do badly. None of it is tax advice; confirm your own filing obligations and dates with your CA.

What actually drives the number

Bookkeeping is priced on volume and complexity, in that order. Before you read a single quote, write down your own figures for these, because every serious provider will ask and the ones who do not ask are guessing.

• Transaction count a month. Bank lines, card lines, cash entries, sales invoices, purchase bills. Count a typical month, not your best one.
• Accounts to reconcile. Every current account, credit card, wallet, aggregator payout account and loan account is a separate reconciliation.
• Entities and registrations. Two firms, or one firm with registrations in two states, is roughly double the filing-adjacent work even when the turnover is the same.
• Payroll headcount, and what payroll means. Running payslips is not the same engagement as computing statutory deductions and preparing the challans and returns behind them.
• Software. Whose licence, whose data, and are you paying for it inside the fee or beside it.
• Cycle. Weekly entry costs more than monthly and is worth more, because errors surface while the paperwork still exists.
• Backlog. Nine months of unentered purchases is a one-time project, and pricing it as ongoing work hides it in your monthly fee forever.

Send the same seven numbers to every provider. Quotes built on the same inputs can be compared; quotes built on each provider's own guess cannot.

The eight questions

Ask these in writing and keep the answers. Most of them take a provider under a minute if the answer exists, and the ones who go quiet have told you something useful.

1. What counts as one transaction, and what is the band? A fee quoted at "up to 300 transactions" is a real commitment. A flat monthly fee with no volume band is a renegotiation waiting for your busy season.
2. Who owns the software subscription and the data inside it? If the ledger lives in the provider's account, ask in advance what leaving looks like.
3. What is the close date, and what arrives on it? "Monthly bookkeeping" should resolve to a named deliverable on a named day — a trial balance and a profit and loss by the fifteenth, say, not records updated sometime.
4. Who reconciles the bank, and is every account in the fee? This is the single most common place where two quotes diverge without saying so.
5. Is payroll payslips only, or payslips plus statutory computation? Get the dividing line in writing, including who is answerable if a deduction is wrong.
6. What is explicitly out of scope? A good provider volunteers this. Return filing, audit support, assessment notices and management reporting are the usual four.
7. Who is the named reviewer? Not the salesperson and not the junior doing entry — the person who checks the work before it reaches you, and how you contact them.
8. What happens when volume doubles? Mid-term repricing terms are easier to agree now than in the month it triggers.

A provider who answers all eight has a working process. A provider who answers in generalities is quoting a hope.

Scope on paper, not scope in conversation

Whatever you agree on the call belongs in a written statement of the work: the inputs you supply and by when, the deliverables and their dates, the volume band, what sits outside, the fee and the repricing trigger. An engagement letter that says "bookkeeping services as required" has recorded nothing and will protect neither side the first time expectations part company.

The clause people forget is exit. Specify what you receive if the engagement ends: the full ledger export, the trial balance, ledger-level detail, the reconciliation statements and the supporting files, in a readable format, within a stated number of days. The cost of a bad bookkeeping relationship is almost never the fee. It is the three months spent reconstructing a year nobody can hand over cleanly.

The in-house comparison, done honestly

Most people compare a monthly fee against a monthly salary and conclude in-house is cheaper. That comparison is wrong in both directions, and the correction is arithmetic rather than opinion.

Start with the real employer cost. Take the salary you would actually have to offer in your city for someone who can do the work unsupervised, then add the statutory contributions, gratuity accrual, bonus, the seat and the laptop, and the software licence the role needs. Run the figure through the Take-Home Salary Calculator in both directions — it is the fastest way to see how far a cost to company sits above the take-home number a candidate is negotiating on. Then add the three costs nobody budgets.

• Review. Someone has to check the work. If that is you, price your own hours; if it is your CA, that is a separate bill.
• Cover. Leave, notice periods and the month after someone resigns, when the books quietly stop.
• Depth. One person knows what they know. A firm has someone who has seen your edge case before.

Against that, in-house buys things outsourcing cannot: same-day answers, someone who learns your customers, and a person who notices that a supplier's rate moved. Neither option is obviously right. The point is that the comparison only means something once both sides carry their full cost, and our longer piece on outsourced bookkeeping against in-house works through the trade in more detail.

Four things that should make you slow down

A fee with no volume band. It is not a price, it is an opening position.

"All inclusive" with no deliverable list. Ask which five documents arrive each month and on which date. If the answer is a feeling rather than a list, the scope does not exist yet.

No named reviewer. Entry work is cheap and review is what you are actually buying.

No exit clause. A provider confident in the work has no reason to resist writing down what you get on the way out.

Give every provider the same starting line

Quotes get wildly easier to compare when the inputs are identical. Before you ask for pricing, settle your own ground: a chart of accounts you have actually looked at, so categorisation is not reinvented per provider; one month of bank reconciliation done or attempted, so you know the true state of the opening position; and a count of your last three months of documents. Our month-end close checklist is a reasonable way to produce that in an afternoon.

That packet does two things at once. It gets you quotes priced on facts instead of assumptions, and it tells you something about each provider from how they respond to it.

What we do, and what we do not

For the sake of clarity about where this is written from: Setu's accounting and bookkeeping service does bookkeeping, accounting and payroll for small and mid-sized businesses on a weekly, monthly, quarterly or annual cycle, working inside the system you already use — QuickBooks, Xero, Zoho Books, FreshBooks, Wave and similar. The scope is transaction recording, bank and card reconciliation, income and expense categorisation, basic receivable and payable tracking, and the statements that come out of a clean ledger.

What that service does not do is sign or file your returns. Keeping the records right and signing off a filing are different jobs with different accountabilities, and anyone blurring them in a sales conversation is worth a second look. Judge us by the same eight questions as everyone else, and ask for the answers in writing.