How to Determine What Bookkeeping Rates
to Charge Your Clients

There are several ways to calculate bookkeeping rates.



Bellow are three general fee structures to help determine which bookkeeping fees are the most fair for you and your client.

Hourly Bookkeeping Rates

An hourly rate might sense if the amount of work you will be doing for your client varies drastically from month to month.

According to salary.com, the national average bookkeepers salary is anywhere from $28,587 to $47,332. However, this varies from place to place. For example, if you live in a large metropolitan city where the cost of living is high, like New York, your rate might be higher.

In addition, if you are charging as a freelance bookkeeper you would charge a higher rate since you are working part time and not receiving any benefits.

Your hourly rate will depend on the nature of your work and other factors such as how much effort it takes from you, how knowledgeable and experienced you are and how much value your service offers to your client.

For example if you are entering bank transactions and reconciling bank statements, you will not be able to negotiate as high an hourly rate as if you are invoicing your clients customers and doing the work of collecting on those invoices. (Trust me invoicing and managing accounts receivable is no easy task!)

Flat Bookkeeping Rates

A flat fee makes sense if you tend to have one type of client that is similar in their business size, business type and their need for your services does not vary much from month to month.

In this case you would be quite knowledgeable ahead of time as to exactly what you will be doing for your client, and exactly how much of your time and effort it will take.

For example, say all your clients are plumbers, with about 5 employees and you know that you will be entering their bank and credit card transactions, reconciling their bank and credit card statements, using job cost analysis to calculate how much they will bill each of their customers, processing their payroll and preparing their quarterly sales tax report.

In this case, you would determine a flat fee for each client and bill them either monthly or quarterly.

Charging a flat rate might be preferred by your client because they know exactly what they will be paying upfront, just make sure that you are being fair to yourself and that you don't end up doing more work than you expected.

A more reasonable way of charging your client might be per transaction.

Per Transaction Bookkeeping Rates

The per transaction rate is an easy way to determine a fair price to charge your client. This way, you can give your client an estimate ahead of time without over or under-extending yourself.

To calculate a per transaction rate, add up the average amount of transactions you will be doing for your client per month. For example, add up all checks, deposits and other bank transactions, credit card transactions, invoices, payroll entries, any transactions at all that you will be doing for your client. Then multiply this by an amount, usually $0.75 is a fair amount.

Usually you add a base fee of around $50, so you would calculate your fee like this: (T * 0.75) + 50.00.

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