Bookkeeping services for CPA and accounting firms
Outsourced bookkeeping for US accounting firms, done by one dedicated person.
You assign the clients. Your bookkeeper does the reconciliations, the payables, the receivables and the month-end close inside your own software, on your own process, and hands the work back to you for review. No shared teams, no rotating staff, no work leaving your systems.
Three ways firms use a dedicated bookkeeper.
Ongoing client bookkeeping
The arrangement most firms choose. Your bookkeeper takes a portfolio of your clients - typically 8 to 15 small business clients for a full-time person, depending on transaction volume - and runs their books every month, all year.
Overflow and season capacity
For firms that need hands from January to April, or during a client’s year-end. Start part-time, scale to full-time for the season, and scale back. We need three weeks notice to add a person.
Cleanup and catch-up projects
A client who has not reconciled since March, or a set of books you inherited. We quote these as a project with a fixed hour estimate, and you approve the estimate before anyone starts.
Exactly what your bookkeeper does.
Daily and weekly work
- Categorising and coding transactions to your chart of accounts
- Bank and credit card reconciliations
- Entering and coding bills in Bill.com, QuickBooks or Xero
- Preparing payment runs for your approval
- Raising client invoices and sending statements
- Chasing overdue receivables using your scripts and your tone
- Filing source documents in Dext, Hubdoc or your document portal
- Flagging anything unusual to you the same day, in writing
Month-end close
- Working your close checklist, in your order
- Prepaid expense schedules and amortisation
- Accrual entries for known unbilled costs
- Fixed asset register updates and depreciation entries
- Payroll journals reconciled to the ADP, Gusto or Paychex report
- Intercompany and loan account reconciliations
- Balance sheet account reconciliations with supporting schedules
- Draft financial statements prepared for your review
- A written close summary listing what was done, what was assumed and what needs your decision
Payables and receivables
- Vendor record setup and maintenance, including W-9 collection tracking
- Three-way matching where the client uses purchase orders
- Aged payables and aged receivables reporting
- Credit memo and refund processing
- 1099-NEC and 1099-MISC preparation and vendor data cleanup
Sales tax and compliance support
- Sales tax reconciliation between the ledger and the filing platform
- Preparing multi-state sales tax filings for your review and submission
- Reconciling sales tax collected to sales tax payable
- Maintaining exemption certificate records
Cleanup and catch-up
- Rebuilding unreconciled bank and credit card accounts, month by month
- Correcting misclassified transactions and undoing duplicate entries
- Resolving negative balances and suspense accounts
- Reconstructing missing periods from statements and source documents
- Migrating from spreadsheets, or between QuickBooks Desktop and QuickBooks Online, or into Xero
- Producing a written summary of every correction made, so your review is fast
The software our team works in.
Ledgers
- QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Desktop, Xero, Sage Intacct, NetSuite, Wave, Zoho Books
Payables and expenses
- Bill.com, Ramp, Expensify, Melio, Dext, Hubdoc
Payroll
- Gusto, ADP, Paychex, QuickBooks Payroll, Rippling
Practice and workflow
- Karbon, Canopy, Jetpack Workflow, Asana, ClickUp, Slack, Microsoft Teams
Sales tax
- Avalara, TaxJar
Using something not on this list? We will train your bookkeeper on it during onboarding at no charge.
Here is what it costs. No form to fill in first.
One price, billed monthly, in US dollars. It covers the person, their equipment, their office, their manager and their replacement if you ever need one.
Full-time bookkeeper
$1,600a month
160 hours a month, about 40 hours a week, dedicated to your firm only. Works your chosen hours.
Part-time bookkeeper
$880a month
80 hours a month, about 20 hours a week. A good way to start if you are not sure you can fill a full week yet.
Included in both, at no extra cost:
- Salary, taxes and benefits
- A laptop and a second monitor
- A desk in a secure, access-controlled office
- Power and internet backup
- A team lead who oversees their work
- Ongoing US GAAP and software training
- A free replacement if the fit is wrong
- 30 days notice to cancel, any time
Not included, and we will not pretend otherwise:
- Software licences stay in your name, because your clients’ data should live in your systems, not ours
- Work outside bookkeeping, such as tax return preparation, which we do not offer
- Hours above the ones you have bought, which are billed at $12 an hour and only with your written approval
- Full US-hours coverage from 9am to 5pm Eastern, which is a night shift in India and costs $150 a month more per person
What firms typically charge their own clients
Firms typically bill their bookkeeping clients between $500 and $1,500 a month per client. One full-time tryACOwork bookkeeper handling ten of those clients costs you $1,600 a month in total. We are telling you this because the arithmetic is the point, and you will do it anyway.
See the day-by-day onboarding timelineWhat we do not do.
We would rather lose an enquiry than take work we are not the right firm for.
- Tax return preparation or review. We do not prepare 1040s, 1120s, 1065s or any other return.
- Signing off on anything. Review and sign-off is your firm’s work and cannot be outsourced.
- Reaching accounting conclusions. We do not write technical memos or position papers that decide a treatment. That judgement is your firm’s and it stays there.
- Making audit judgements. We do not determine materiality, conclude on going concern, or decide whether audit evidence is sufficient.
- Talking to your clients, unless you specifically ask us to and set it up with them first.
- Holding your clients’ data on our own systems. It stays in yours.
- Bookkeeping for businesses directly. We only work with accounting firms, so we will never compete with you for your client.
That last point matters more than it might look. Some providers sell to firms and to small businesses at the same time. We do not, and we never will.
Is this a good fit for your firm?
It works well when
- You have at least 20 hours a week of bookkeeping you would happily hand over
- Your clients are mostly on cloud accounting software
- You have a way you like things done, even if it is not written down yet - we will write it down with you
- You are willing to spend two or three hours in the first two weeks getting someone up to speed
- You want the same person for years, not a different person each month
It does not work well when
- You need fewer than 10 hours a week - a dedicated person is the wrong shape for that
- All the work is on desktop software with no remote access and no plan to change
- You need someone to make judgement calls without review, which no outsourced provider should ever do
- You need tax return preparation, which we do not offer
- You want the cheapest hourly rate available - there are providers at $6 an hour and we are not competing with them
If you are reading the right-hand column and recognising your firm, tell us on the call and we will say so. We will also tell you if we think you should wait.
Questions about the work itself.
For a full-time person, usually 8 to 15 small business clients, depending on transaction volume and how clean the books are. A client with 40 transactions a month and one bank account is very different from a restaurant with three locations and daily deposits. We will estimate it properly on the call, based on your actual client list.
We do, with you, in the first week. It is usually four to six pages: your chart of accounts conventions, your close checklist, your naming conventions, how you want questions asked, and what must never be done without asking you. You review and approve it. It becomes the training document for any future person on your account, which is what makes replacement painless.
You will know their leave calendar in advance. For planned leave, a trained backup from our team covers the work using your process document. For unplanned absence, the team lead covers it. You are not billed extra for cover.
Yes, and many firms do. We quote the cleanup as a fixed hour estimate, you approve it, and if it goes well you convert to a monthly arrangement with the same person. The free 20-hour pilot can be spent on a cleanup.
Find out what one bookkeeper would do for your firm.
A 20-minute video call. We will tell you what it costs, how many of your clients one person could carry, and whether we are the right fit - including if we are not.