What Bookkeeping Costs in 2026: Published Prices, Sourced and Dated

TL;DR: On September 11, 2026 we opened the pricing page of every bookkeeping service we could name and wrote down what it actually printed. Entry prices that exist in public: $59 a month at Intuit for guidance only, $99 at Pilot with an expense cap, $199 at Bench and at Collective, $375 at a Philadelphia firm, $395 at Xendoo, $469 at 1-800Accountant. Most local firms publish nothing. TidyMonth is $199 a month, with catch-up quoted as a fixed price before anything is charged. Every row below links to the page it came from and the date we read it.

If you have spent an afternoon searching "how much does a bookkeeper cost", you already know the problem. You get blog posts with ranges wide enough to be useless, and firm websites where the pricing page is a contact form.

So this is the page the category does not write. Below is what was actually published, by whom, on one specific day, with the link. No ranges collected from other people's blog posts. No averages. If a provider did not print a number on its own site on September 11, 2026, it is not in the table.

What the national services publish

Provider	Entry price	What that price includes	Source	Checked
QuickBooks (Intuit)	$59/mo	Expert Assisted, free for 30 days then $59/mo. It is guidance while you keep doing the work. Expert Full Service Bookkeeping is listed "Starting at $300/mo" and "After initial cleanup fee"; the cleanup fee is not published. A QuickBooks Online subscription is priced separately, from $19/mo promotional.	quickbooks.intuit.com/oa/live/pricing	2026-09-11
Pilot	$99/mo	Essentials. Up to $100,000 in monthly expenses. Cash-basis bookkeeping from your bank and card data, a standard chart of accounts, AI transaction insights, a year-end tax package, in-app messaging support. The Core tier, which is the one that names a US-based bookkeeper and reports by the tenth business day, shows no dollar figure and routes to sales, as does Custom.	pilot.com/pricing	2026-09-11
Bench	$199/mo	"Starting at $199*/mo billed monthly" for Bookkeeping Grow, which the page limits to businesses doing less than $250,000 annually. Dedicated bookkeeping experts, monthly books, profit and loss, balance sheet, 1099 reporting, pre-scheduled communication. Core is $399/mo, Core + Tax is $599/mo, and annual billing is 20% less. An hourly option is listed at $55/hr with a $1,200 onboarding fee.	bench.co/pricing	2026-09-11
Collective	$199/mo	LLC plan. Automated monthly bookkeeping, invoicing, quarterly tax estimates, and basic individual tax returns, built for solo owners. The S Corp plan is $349/mo and adds the S Corp election, Form 1120-S, payroll, and a dedicated account manager. Yearly billing is shown as "Save 15%" without a separate figure.	collective.com/plans-and-pricing	2026-09-11
Xendoo	$395/mo	Essential, or $355/mo billed annually. Bookkeeping for up to $50K in monthly expenses, up to 4 bank and card accounts, cash basis, one integration. Growth is $695 ($625 annual) and Scale is $995 ($895 annual). Catch-up bookkeeping is listed separately, starting at $295/mo.	xendoo.com/xendoo-pricing	2026-09-11
1-800Accountant	$469/mo billed annually	Business Complete, the lowest plan that includes the bookkeeping service itself, with a dedicated bookkeeper starting at 75 monthly transactions, payroll handling, and quarterly estimated tax. Tax Advisory at $209/mo and Starter at $299/mo, both billed annually, include tax work and bookkeeping software but not the bookkeeping service.	1800accountant.com/pricing	2026-09-11

Read the middle column before the price column. Three of these six bundle tax filing into the monthly number and one of them is guidance rather than bookkeeping, so the six numbers are not six prices for the same thing.

What Philadelphia-area firms publish

We looked for local firms that print a price. Most do not. These three did, on the same day.

Firm	Entry price	What that price includes	Source	Checked
Philly Bookkeeping Solutions (Philadelphia)	$375/mo	Silver: up to 50 transactions, bank and card reconciliations for up to 2 accounts, quarterly reports, email support, $150 setup fee, QuickBooks Online not included. Gold is $525/mo for up to 300 transactions and 4 accounts with monthly reports. Platinum is $775/mo for up to 500 transactions and 6 accounts, with the QuickBooks Online subscription included and the setup fee waived.	phillybookkeepingsolutions.com/rates	2026-09-11
Fire & Forge Business Solutions (West Chester, PA)	from $300/mo	"Monthly plans from $300", with a published range of $300 to $850 a month scoped to volume and complexity. Cleanup work is quoted separately as a fixed fee.	fireandforgesolutions.com/bookkeeping-west-chester-pa	2026-09-11
Infinity Bookkeepers (Doylestown, PA)	$95/hour	Publishes an hourly rate rather than a monthly package, covering monthly bookkeeping, QuickBooks setup and conversion, payroll setup, and prior-year cleanup. A fixed fee is available by custom quote.	infinitybookkeepers.com/bookkeeping-packages	2026-09-11

Several other Philadelphia and suburban firms were checked and publish no dollar figure at all. They are not listed here because there is nothing to list. That is the norm, not an exception, and it is worth understanding before you read the next section.

One note on the hourly row. An hourly rate is a published price, but it is not a published cost. At $95 an hour, your monthly bill depends entirely on how many hours the month takes, which is the number nobody can tell you in advance.

TidyMonth's own row

Same format, same rules. This is what is on our pricing page today.

Provider	Entry price	What that price includes	Source	Checked
TidyMonth	$199/mo	Transaction categorization with questions sent to you, monthly reconciliation for up to six bank and card accounts, a bookkeeper who reviews the close before you see it, profit and loss, balance sheet, and a close packet each month, a year-end package your accountant can work from, and ledger and report exports. Scope is US cash-basis service businesses, one entity, USD, up to six accounts, up to about 300 transactions a month. No setup fee. Cancel anytime. Tax filing is not included.	tidymonth.com/pricing	2026-09-11

Catch-up for past months is priced separately, as it is almost everywhere. The bands, as starting points:

• Up to 3 months behind: included with the monthly subscription.
• 4 to 6 months behind: from $399, once, alongside your first month.
• 7 to 12 months behind: from $799, once, alongside your first month.
• More than 12 months behind: needs review before we can confirm whether we can help.

Those base prices assume up to three accounts. Four to six accounts, more than twelve months, or more than about 300 transactions a month all need a reviewed quote. The final number comes from a person looking at your actual records, which is why these are bands and not an instant quote. Nothing is charged until you approve the price in writing.

Why "contact us for pricing" is the category norm

It is worth being fair about this, because not every reason is a bad one.

The work really does vary. Two businesses with the same revenue can differ by ten times in transaction count. One account and 40 transactions a month is a different job from four accounts, a payment processor, and 600. Any honest fixed price has to state the volume it assumes, which is why the published tiers above nearly all carry a cap.

The state of the books is unknown until someone looks. A firm quoting a monthly price without seeing the file is guessing about how much of month one is cleanup. This is the strongest reason to withhold the catch-up number. It is not a reason to withhold the monthly one.

Published prices remove room to price each client differently. If the firm charges what each client will bear, a number on the website costs it money. This reason is real and it is never the one you are given.

A quote is a sales conversation. Some firms want the call. The form is there to get it.

The first two justify quoting catch-up after a look, which is what we do. They do not justify hiding the recurring price of a recurring service. If a service has a standard scope, it can print the standard price and say what changes it.

What a written quote should contain

Whoever you hire, ask for these in writing before you sign. A quote missing any of the first five is not yet a price.

1. The monthly fee, and whether it is billed monthly or annually.
2. The number of bank and credit card accounts reconciled at that fee.
3. The transaction volume assumed, and what happens when you go over it. This is the line that turns a $199 quote into a $450 invoice in month four.
4. The catch-up or cleanup price for past months, as a separate line with the months it covers.
5. Any setup or onboarding fee, including a fee waived only on the top tier.
6. Whether the accounting software subscription is included or billed to you separately.
7. What is delivered each month and by when. "Monthly financials" and "profit and loss, balance sheet, and a reconciliation report by the tenth business day" are different promises.
8. Whether a person reviews the close, or whether review is triggered only when something looks wrong.
9. Whether tax filing is included. Several of the published prices above include a return and several do not. This is the largest single reason two quotes are not comparable.
10. What leaving costs, and whether you can export your ledger and reports.

Then compare quotes on the same row, not on the headline. A $99 plan with a $100,000 expense cap, a $199 plan that includes a personal tax return, and a $375 plan capped at 50 transactions are three different products that happen to be sold on the same search result page.

If you are gathering quotes because your books are behind rather than because you are shopping, the sequence matters: read how to catch up when you are months behind first, because the catch-up line will dominate your first invoice. If a CPA has asked you for records, this checklist is what they are usually asking for.

How this page is maintained

Every figure above was read on the provider's own pricing page on September 11, 2026. Prices in this category change without announcement, promotional rates expire, and plans get renamed, so treat the date as part of the number.

This page is refreshed quarterly. At each refresh every row is re-read on the source page. A row whose price we cannot verify on the official page that day is removed rather than carried forward or estimated, and a provider that stops publishing drops out of the table until it publishes again. The updated date at the top of this guide is when the rows were last confirmed true. Nothing here is sourced from another blog's summary of a competitor's price, including our own summary of it.

What this is and is not

This is a record of published prices, not a ranking and not advice about which service fits you. Every provider above sells a different scope, and the middle column is where the difference lives.

TidyMonth does the monthly books and produces the year-end package. It does not file returns and does not decide tax treatment. Whether an expense is deductible, how an owner's draw is treated, which entity type you should elect: those are your accountant's calls, and they stay your accountant's calls whichever service you hire.