Ask three bookkeepers to quote the same business and the spread is routinely four to one. That is not because two of them are wrong. It is because they are quoting for different work, and almost nobody says which.
Here is what the Australian market actually charges, what moves your number within that range, and how to read a quote so you are comparing the same thing.
What the market charges
| Basis | Typical range | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Hourly, general bookkeeping | $40 to $90 per hour | Sydney and Melbourne sit at the upper end, regional lower |
| Hourly, senior or complex | $80 to $120 per hour | Award payroll, multi entity, clean-up work |
| Fixed monthly, micro business | $300 to $600 per month | Sole trader or very low volume |
| Fixed monthly, small business | $600 to $1,200 per month | The band most employing businesses land in |
| Fixed monthly, full service | $2,000 and above | Complex payroll, high volume, management reporting |
Ranges reflect the Australian market for the 2026-27 financial year. Treat them as the shape of the market, not a quote.
Why the same business gets wildly different numbers
Four quotes for one business usually means four different assumptions about scope. The most common differences:
- Whether payroll is included. Payroll is the single biggest swing factor and is frequently quoted separately or excluded entirely.
- Whether the quarter is prepared or just coded. Coding transactions is not the same as producing a reconciled, checked working paper a registered agent can lodge from.
- Whether anyone reconciles to the statement. Some quotes cover categorising the bank feed and stop there. The feed agreeing with itself is not reconciliation.
- Whether the file is already clean. A cheap ongoing rate quoted without looking at the file is a rate for a file that does not exist yet.
- Whether you get reports and a human to explain them, or a file you are left to interpret.
The five things that actually move your price
- Transaction volume. Not revenue. A $2 million consultancy issuing twelve invoices a month is cheaper to run than a $400,000 cafe with a thousand card settlements.
- Employees, and how they are paid. Four salaried staff on identical contracts is close to trivial. Fourteen casuals on a hospitality or care award with penalties, allowances and changing rosters is a different job. Since payday super started on 1 July 2026, payroll also carries a super deadline every pay run rather than every quarter, which adds real work.
- How many places the data comes from. One bank account and one card is simple. Add a POS, a job management app, a payment gateway and two merchant facilities and someone has to reconcile each of them to the ledger every month.
- The state you are starting from. A file with two years of suspense entries costs more in month one than in month twelve. This should be scoped and priced separately, not buried in an ongoing rate.
- What you want out of it. Compliant records so your agent can lodge is the floor. Knowing which jobs made money, or what next month’s cash looks like, is more work and more value.
Nobody can quote your business responsibly without looking inside the file. A fixed price offered before anyone has opened your accounts is a guess, and guesses get corrected later in your direction.
Hourly or fixed monthly
Hourly looks fairer and usually is not, for a reason that has nothing to do with honesty.
Under an hourly arrangement, the slower and less organised the work, the more you pay. You carry the cost of their inefficiency, their learning curve on your file, and every interruption. You also cannot budget, and you get a bill that varies for reasons you cannot see.
Worse, hourly billing quietly discourages you from asking questions. Plenty of business owners avoid ringing their bookkeeper because the clock is running, which is exactly the opposite of what you want.
A fixed monthly fee moves that risk to the provider. They now have an incentive to set the file up properly, build the bank rules and automate what can be automated, because the efficiency benefit is theirs. You get one number you can budget and you can ask questions without watching the meter.
The fair exception is genuinely unpredictable work. Catch-up on a file nobody has seen should be scoped as a separate fixed price project once someone has looked, not folded into a monthly rate.
What cheap usually means
A rate well below the market band is not automatically bad, but it is always worth asking what has been left out. In practice the cheapest quotes tend to mean one of these:
- Coding only, with no reconciliation to statement
- Payroll excluded, priced later at a higher rate
- No month end close, so nothing is ever locked and figures keep moving
- Work done offshore with no Australian award or GST review, which is fine when it is supervised and disclosed and a problem when it is neither
- An introductory rate that steps up after three or six months
The cost of the last one is not the fee. It is that the errors surface at year end, and your accountant fixes them at accountant rates.
Want a number for your actual business?
We look inside the file first, then quote a fixed monthly fee in writing. You keep the findings either way.
What a proper quote contains
Before you accept anything, it should say in writing:
- Which accounts are reconciled, and to statement or to feed
- Whether payroll is included, for how many employees, and what happens when that number changes
- What is produced each month, and by which date
- Who prepares the quarter, and who is the registered agent lodging it
- What clean-up is needed before the ongoing rate applies, priced separately
- What is explicitly not included
Point four matters more than most people realise. Only a registered BAS agent or tax agent can lodge on your behalf or advise on BAS obligations for a fee. If your bookkeeper is not registered, there has to be a registered agent somewhere in the arrangement, and the quote should say who.
Where we sit
Our bookkeeping starts at $25 a week for a straightforward file, and everything is a fixed monthly fee quoted after we have looked inside your accounts. We do not quote from a phone call, because a number produced without seeing the file is a number that gets revised.
We are not a registered BAS agent and we do not lodge. We prepare the quarter and the working paper, and your registered agent lodges from it. See what the monthly work covers, or what doing it yourself actually costs once your own hours are priced.
