How Much Does Outsourced Accounting Cost?

If you are trying to budget for outsourced accounting, the honest starting point is that almost nobody publishes a single number. Providers publish entry tiers, then quote the rest. That is not evasion. Price genuinely moves with volume, entity count, revenue complexity and how fast you want the books closed.

This guide gives you a model instead of a number. You will learn the seven drivers that move a quote, see the prices five providers actually publish today, and walk through two fully built cost stacks you can check line by line. Every figure here traces to a footnote. Where the published data does not support a number, this guide says “quoted only” rather than guessing.

Cost is also no longer the only reason companies outsource. Deloitte’s 2024 Global Outsourcing Survey of more than 500 executives found access to skilled talent and agility sitting alongside cost reduction as key drivers, with 83% of respondents using AI as part of their outsourced services.²¹

Finalert publishes plan tiers, set out in full below, and quotes a final figure after a scoping call. Every other number in this guide is another provider’s published price.

Start with what you are actually buying

Outsourced accounting is usually sold in four scope bands, and the words are used loosely across the market. Fix your definitions before you compare quotes.

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The bands stack. When a quote looks unusually low for its label, the first question is which of the layers below it you are still paying for separately.

The seven drivers that move your price

Every quote you receive is a function of the same small set of variables. Here is how each one moves the number, and the evidence to gather before your first call.

Transaction volume

Volume is the base layer of almost every published price list. Pilot’s entry bookkeeping tier is capped at $100,000 in monthly expenses, and its next tier is explicitly priced as a function of monthly expense volume rather than a flat fee.¹³ Bench splits its lowest tier by revenue, restricting it to businesses under $250,000 in annual revenue.¹⁴

The cost curve is not linear. A clean, well-integrated 2,000-line month can cost less to process than a messy 400-line month with cash receipts and mixed personal spending.

Evidence to bring: a twelve-month count of bank, credit card and payment processor lines, plus your average monthly expense total. Both numbers appear on published rate cards, so both directly determine your tier.

Number of legal entities

Each additional entity means a separate ledger, separate reconciliations, intercompany eliminations and a consolidation step. Providers treat this as a tier break rather than a small uplift. Kruze places multi-entity consolidation in its Premium tier, which is custom priced rather than published.¹⁷ inDinero lists multi-entity support across its tiers but prices its most complex tier, Executive, as custom.¹⁶

Two entities are more than twice the work of one, because the consolidation and elimination logic is new work neither entity required alone. Dormant entities still cost money if they need filings.

Evidence to bring: a list of every registered entity, its state, whether it trades, and whether intercompany transactions flow between them.

Payroll headcount

Headcount drives both processing effort and compliance exposure. Bookkeeper360 publishes payroll administration from $200 per month as a separate line item rather than bundling it.¹⁵ Pilot moves payroll administration into its Custom bookkeeping tier, which is contact-sales only.¹³

Compliance scales with headcount too. Once employment taxes in the lookback period exceed $50,000 you move from monthly to semiweekly deposits, and accumulating $100,000 of undeposited taxes on any single day triggers a next-business-day deposit.⁹ More people also means more W-2s and more state registrations.

Evidence to bring: current headcount, states of employment, pay frequency, and whether you are a monthly or semiweekly depositor.

Revenue recognition complexity

This is the single largest driver of the gap between a bookkeeping price and an accounting price. Time-and-materials invoicing with no deferrals is close to mechanical. Subscriptions, milestones, multi-element contracts, inventory and deferred revenue require judgment every month.

The published tiers show the break clearly. Kruze puts GAAP revenue recognition in its Founder Timesaver tier at $850 to $1,500 per month, and pushes advanced revenue recognition and inventory into custom-priced Premium.¹⁷ inDinero reserves revenue recognition and budget analysis for its custom Executive tier.¹⁶

Evidence to bring: your three largest contract types with payment terms, plus a statement of whether you hold inventory and whether you defer any revenue today.

Close cadence

How fast you want the books closed changes staffing, not just effort. A firm that promises a six-business-day close has to hold capacity for you. Pilot prices this explicitly: reports by the tenth business day sit in its Core tier, and sixth business day reporting sits in the higher Custom tier.¹³ Bookkeeper360 charges from $399 per month for a monthly bookkeeping cadence and from $599 per month for a weekly one, a difference of about 50% for the same underlying work delivered more often.¹⁵

For context on what is normal, APQC’s benchmarking across roughly 2,300 organizations put the median monthly close at 6.4 calendar days, with the top quartile at 4.8 days or fewer and the bottom quartile at 10 days or more.¹⁹ If you are sitting in that bottom quartile, the useful question is not just what a faster close costs, but what the delay is costing you in decisions made on stale numbers.

Finalert’s published case study with CWS Global, a nonprofit and humanitarian organization, reports a 50% faster month-end close alongside real-time grant and donor visibility and audit-ready compliance.²⁶ That is one engagement with a specific starting point, not a rate you should expect to be quoted, and Finalert quotes after a scoping call.

Evidence to bring: your actual close date for the last six months, not your target, and the list of items that most often hold it up.

Reporting depth

A trial balance, a P&L and a balance sheet are table stakes. Cost rises when you need cash flow forecasts, departmental or class-level tracking, KPI dashboards, board packs or investor-ready packages.

Kruze includes department and class tracking in its Founder Timesaver tier rather than its Basic tier.¹⁷ Bookkeeper360 prices planning artifacts as separate projects, at from $2,000 for a 12-month budget and from $10,000 for a three-year forecast.¹⁵ That second figure is a useful anchor: deep forward-looking work is priced like a project, not a monthly line.

Evidence to bring: the actual reporting pack your board, lender or investors ask for, with the deadline attached to each item.

Software stack

Your stack sets a floor under the total cost and shapes how much manual work remains. QuickBooks Online list prices for subscriptions renewing on or after August 1, 2026 are $85 per month for Essentials, $140 for Plus and $340 for Advanced, per a secondary source reporting Intuit’s announced changes.¹⁸

Providers also price around the stack. Bookkeeper360 lists back-office technology from $150 per month as its own line, and inDinero states its tiers run on QuickBooks Online or NetSuite.¹⁵¹⁶ If you are on a platform a provider does not usually support, expect a higher quote or a migration project first.

What published providers actually charge today

These are the prices five providers publish on their own pricing pages, fetched September 2, 2026. Anything not listed here is contact-sales.

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Two structural notes. Bench’s annual billing is a 20% discount against monthly, so the annual figures above are not directly comparable to monthly rates elsewhere.¹⁴ Pilot’s CFO prices are all quoted on annual billing.¹³ Kruze and Bookkeeper360 both charge a separate one-time onboarding or cleanup fee, from $1,000 at Bookkeeper360.¹⁵¹⁷

Finalert’s published plans

Finalert publishes its own plan structure, banded by monthly transaction count and number of accounts rather than by revenue or monthly expenses.²⁷ It is worth reading alongside the table above, because it prices the moving parts separately and that makes a quote easier to audit.

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Note what this structure tells you. These plans sit at the full-service end of the market rather than the self-serve end, and they price the accounting work separately from payroll and transaction processing. Compare like with like: a $1,500 Basic plan is not competing with a $99 Pilot Essentials subscription, it is competing with a staffed engagement. The published tiers are the starting structure, and Finalert quotes the final figure after a scoping call.

Market price ranges by scope and revenue

The table below is built entirely from the published prices above. Read the derivation underneath before you use any cell.

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Bookkeeping, under $1M. The floor is Pilot Bookkeeping Essentials at $99 per month, which fits comfortably inside a sub-$1M business given its $100,000 monthly expense cap.¹³ The ceiling is Bench Core at about $399 per month on monthly billing and Bookkeeper360’s monthly bookkeeping from $399.¹⁵¹⁴ Bench’s Grow tier at about $199 per month sits inside this range but is restricted to businesses under $250,000 in revenue.¹⁴

Bookkeeping, $1-5M. The $100,000 monthly expense cap on Pilot’s entry tier rules it out for most businesses in this band, so the floor rises to the $399 per month published by both Bench Core and Bookkeeper360.¹⁴¹⁵ The ceiling of $850 comes from Bookkeeper360’s weekly cadence at from $599 and Kruze Basic’s published top of $850.¹⁵¹⁷

Bookkeeping, $5-25M and $25M+. No provider here publishes a bookkeeping-only price at this scale. Pilot’s Custom tier is contact sales and Kruze Premium is custom.¹³¹⁷ Both cells read “quoted only”.

Full accounting, under $1M. Kruze Basic at $650 to $850 per month is accrual bookkeeping with a dedicated accounting manager, which sits at the bottom of this scope band.¹⁷ inDinero Essential at from $750 per month lands inside the same range and includes a dedicated controller and accounting team.¹⁶

Full accounting, $1-5M. Kruze Founder Timesaver at $850 to $1,500 per month adds GAAP revenue recognition, department and class tracking and bill pay, which is the working definition of full accounting for a company of this size.¹⁷ inDinero Growth from $1,250 per month falls inside that range.¹⁶

Full accounting, $5-25M. inDinero Growth’s from $1,250 per month is the only published floor that survives into this band, and it is a floor rather than a price.¹⁶ Everything above it, at Kruze Premium and inDinero Executive, is custom.¹⁷¹⁶ So the cell states the floor and marks the top as quoted.

Controller. No provider here sells a standalone controller retainer with a published price. inDinero bundles a dedicated controller and accounting team into every tier, so the cells inherit its floors of $750 and $1,250 per month and are labeled bundled.¹⁶ Kruze includes a dedicated accounting manager in Basic rather than pricing it separately.¹⁷ Above $5M there is no published figure.

Fractional CFO. Pilot publishes three CFO tiers at $1,750, $3,150 and from $5,250 per month, and Bookkeeper360 publishes fractional CFO from $2,000 per month.¹³¹⁵ The under-$1M cell pairs Pilot Basic with the Bookkeeper360 floor. The $1-5M cell spans Pilot Basic to Pilot Essentials. The $5-25M cell spans Pilot Essentials to the Custom floor. Above $25M, Pilot Custom is a “from” price with no published ceiling, so the cell reads quoted only.

Worked example A: a $3M services company

Profile: about 350 transactions per month, one legal entity, 22 employees on payroll, simple time-and-materials revenue with no deferrals, monthly close, board-light reporting, QuickBooks Online Plus.

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The arithmetic: $850 + $200 + $140 + $83 + $83 = $1,356 at the low end, and $1,500 + $200 + $140 + $167 + $100 = $2,107 at the high end. Annualized that is roughly $16,272 to $25,284, and the second year drops by the amortized onboarding, so about $15,276 to $24,084.

Note what is absent. There is no fractional CFO line, because board-light reporting does not require one. Adding it would put another $1,750 to $2,000 per month on top.¹³¹⁵ Simple time-and-materials revenue is why this company sits in Kruze’s Founder Timesaver band rather than custom-priced Premium.

For comparison, the in-house alternative. The national median wage for Bookkeeping, Accounting and Auditing Clerks is $50,670.² BLS reports benefit costs at 30.1% of total employer compensation for private industry workers, which is $14.01 per hour against $32.60 per hour of wages, or about 43% of wages.⁵ Applying that as a derived estimate: $50,670 x 0.43 = $21,788 of benefits, for a fully loaded $72,458. Add SHRM’s average cost per hire of $4,129 in year one and the first-year figure is about $76,587.⁸ At Robert Half’s mid-point starting salary for a bookkeeper of $62,750, the same math gives $62,750 x 1.43 = $89,733 fully loaded.²²

That single hire does the bookkeeping. It does not review its own work, own the close calendar, or file the tax return.

Priced against Finalert’s published plans, the same company lands differently, because those plans band on transactions rather than expenses and price payroll separately. At 350 transactions a month this company sits in the Professional band at $3,500 per month. Payroll for 22 employees adds $100 plus 22 x $50 = $1,200 per month, and an accounts payable and receivable add-on in the middle band adds $500 per month.²⁷ That is $3,500 + $1,200 + $500 = $5,200 per month, plus $140 for QuickBooks Online Plus, so about $5,340 per month or $64,080 a year.¹⁸²⁷

The gap between that and the $1,356 to $2,107 platform-tier build above is not a pricing anomaly, it is a scope difference. The platform build has no accounts payable and receivable execution, no payroll administration priced to headcount, and no named accounting team. Compare both against what your month-end actually requires rather than against each other.

Worked example B: a $12M e-commerce company

Profile: high transaction volume across multiple sales channels, two legal entities, 40 employees, inventory and deferred revenue, monthly close plus weekly cash reporting, QuickBooks Online Advanced plus a bill pay tool.

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The arithmetic on the subtotal: $1,250 + $200 + $200 + $125 + $150 + $340 + $83 = $2,348. Adding the fractional CFO band gives $2,348 + $2,000 = $4,348 at the low end and $2,365 + $3,150 = $5,515 at the high end. Annualized, roughly $52,176 to $66,180.

Read that total as a floor, not a range. The two features that define this company, multi-entity consolidation and inventory with deferred revenue, are exactly what Kruze and inDinero move into custom pricing.¹⁷¹⁶ The quote will land above this floor, and only a scoping call will say by how much.

Against Finalert’s published plans, this company’s transaction volume puts it at or above the Premium band of $5,000 per month for up to 500 transactions and 5 accounts, and two entities with inventory and deferred revenue point at Elite, which is quoted rather than published.²⁷ Payroll for 40 employees adds $100 plus 40 x $50 = $2,100 per month, and cross-channel volume puts the accounts payable and receivable add-on in the top band at $1,000 per month.²⁷ The published floor is therefore $5,000 + $2,100 + $1,000 = $8,100 per month, plus $340 for QuickBooks Online Advanced, so about $8,440 per month or $101,280 a year before any CFO-level support.¹⁸²⁷ Add a fractional CFO at the published market band of $2,000 to $3,150 per month and the annual figure moves to roughly $125,280 to $139,080.¹³¹⁵ Treat all of that as a floor. Elite is custom priced for a reason.

The in-house comparison at this size is a team, not a person. The BLS 75th percentile for Accountants and Auditors is $109,810, which at the same 43% benefit load is $109,810 x 1.43 = $157,028 fully loaded as a derived estimate.¹⁵ Robert Half’s mid-point starting salary for a Senior Accountant is $94,750, which loads to $135,493.²³ BLS does not publish a “Controller” occupation. The closest published proxy is Financial Managers, at a national median of $166,570, which loads to $166,570 x 1.43 = $238,195.³⁵ Treat that as a proxy rather than a controller salary. Robert Half’s mid-point starting salary for a Corporate Controller is $185,000, which loads to $264,550.²⁴ A dedicated payroll clerk adds a national median of $58,260, or $83,312 loaded.⁴⁵

Hiring that team is also harder than it was. The AICPA’s 2025 Trends report counted 55,152 accounting degrees awarded in 2023-24, down 6.6% after a 9.6% fall the year before, and new CPA Exam candidates fell from 42,626 in 2023 to 28,082 in 2024.²⁰ Spring 2025 enrollment rebounded 12.4% to 266,506 students, so the pipeline is recovering at the entry point while the experienced middle stays thin.²⁰

The cost of not outsourcing

The compliance calendar runs whether or not anyone is watching it. These are the fixed obligations and the published penalties for missing them.

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The failure-to-deposit penalty is tiered by lateness: 2% for 1 to 5 days, 5% for 6 to 15 days, 10% for more than 15 days, and 15% for more than 10 days after the first IRS notice or after a demand notice. The penalties do not stack.¹²

The underlying tax rates set the size of the base those percentages apply to. Social Security is 6.2% employer and 6.2% employee, Medicare is 1.45% each, the 2026 Social Security wage base is $184,500, and Additional Medicare Tax of 0.9% is withheld on wages above $200,000.⁶ FUTA is 6.0% on the first $7,000 of wages per employee, with a credit of up to 5.4% for state unemployment taxes paid on time, for a net 0.6%.⁷

There is a second cost that never appears on an invoice. If your close sits in APQC’s bottom quartile at 10 days or more, every decision in the first third of the month runs on last month’s incomplete picture.¹⁹

What a scoping call should cover

Bring these to the first call. A provider who cannot price against this list is going to reprice you later.

Questions

Questions people ask about this

Is outsourced accounting cheaper than hiring?

At the bookkeeping-only layer the published prices are clearly below a loaded salary. Bookkeeper360's monthly bookkeeping from $399 per month is about $4,788 a year, against a fully loaded in-house bookkeeper of roughly $72,458 using the national median wage and the derived 43% benefit load.¹⁵²⁵ But those are not the same scope. The comparison only becomes fair when you price the full outsourced stack, including controller review and tax, against the full in-house team plus recruiting and software.

Why will nobody give me a price for a $10M company?

Because published rate cards stop where complexity starts. Kruze Premium and inDinero Executive, the tiers that cover multi-entity consolidation, advanced revenue recognition and inventory, are both custom priced.¹⁷¹⁶ Providers cannot publish a number for work whose scope they cannot see in advance.

What should I budget for onboarding?

Published one-time fees start at $1,000 for Bookkeeper360's onboarding and prior-period cleanup, and Bench charges $1,200 onboarding on its hourly QBO bookkeeper offering.¹⁵¹⁴ Kruze states that a one-time onboarding fee applies without publishing the amount.¹⁷ If your books need real cleanup, treat the published floors as a floor.

Does a faster close really cost more?

Yes, and the pricing pages show it directly. Pilot places tenth-business-day reporting in a lower tier than sixth-business-day reporting, and Bookkeeper360 charges from $599 per month for a weekly cadence against from $399 for a monthly one.¹³¹⁵ Against a market median close of 6.4 days, a faster commitment means the provider holds capacity for you.¹⁹

What is a realistic fractional CFO retainer?

Published retainers run from $1,750 per month at Pilot CFO Basic through $3,150 at Essentials to from $5,250 at Custom, with Bookkeeper360 fractional CFO from $2,000 per month.¹³¹⁵ That gives a defensible band of roughly $1,750 to $5,250 or more per month. For scale, Robert Half's mid-point starting salary for a full-time CFO is $269,750, which at the derived 43% benefit load is $385,743.²⁵⁵ Hourly benchmarks circulating online could not be verified at source, so this guide does not publish one.

Do I still pay for software?

Almost always. QuickBooks Online list prices for renewals from August 1, 2026 are $85 for Essentials, $140 for Plus and $340 for Advanced per month, per a secondary source reporting Intuit's announced changes.¹⁸ Bookkeeper360 also prices back-office technology management from $150 per month as a separate line.¹⁵

How does outsourcing change my payroll tax risk?

It changes who does the work, not who is liable. The deposit schedules, the 941 and 940 filings, the January 31 W-2 and 1099-NEC deadlines and the 2% to 15% failure-to-deposit penalty tiers all still apply to you.^9101112 What you are buying is a process that runs the calendar reliably.

What does Finalert charge?

Finalert publishes bookkeeping plans from $1,500 to $5,000 per month banded by monthly transaction count and number of accounts, payroll at $100 per month plus $50 per employee, and an accounts payable and receivable add-on at $250, $500 or $1,000 per month by volume band.²⁷ Those tiers are the starting structure. Finalert quotes the final figure after a scoping call, because entity count, revenue recognition and close cadence all move the number. Finalert has served 110+ U.S. businesses with 100% client satisfaction and operates two U.S. offices, headquartered in Cleveland with a New York office.²⁶