The honest answer first: at Shea Business Solutions, monthly bookkeeping for an Orlando small business starts at $200 per month, payroll support starts at $100 per month, and tax preparation starts at $90. What you actually pay depends on transaction volume, how many accounts you run, whether payroll and sales tax are in the picture, and how far behind the books are on day one. The rest of this guide breaks down each factor so you can price the work before you ever get on a call, with us or with anyone else.
The Three Ways Bookkeepers Charge
Hourly billing
The oldest model: you pay for time, whatever the month brings. Hourly works for genuinely unpredictable work, but it puts all the risk on you. A slow bookkeeper costs more than a fast one for the same books, and you find out at invoice time.
Flat monthly pricing
A fixed price for a defined scope: reconciliations, categorization, and monthly financial statements, the same number every month. This is how we price, because owners budget in months, not hours. The full case for the model is on our flat-rate bookkeeping page.
Hybrid and project pricing
Cleanups, catch-up projects, and one-time setups usually price as a flat project quote after someone actually looks at the file. Be wary of any firm that quotes a cleanup without opening your QuickBooks first. They are guessing, and the surprise lands on your invoice.
What Actually Moves the Price
Transaction volume
A consultant with forty transactions a month and a restaurant with two thousand are different jobs, even if both call it bookkeeping. Volume is the first thing any honest quote asks about, and it is why starting prices are starting prices.
Number of accounts
Every checking account, credit card, loan, and payment processor is another reconciliation every month. Square, Toast, Stripe, and PayPal each add a layer, because processor deposits arrive net of fees and have to be grossed back up to match real sales.
Payroll
Payroll pricing scales with headcount and frequency. In Florida that includes quarterly RT-6 reemployment tax filings on the first $7,000 of each employee's wages, plus W-2s in January. Tipped employees add tip reporting on top. Our payroll support starts at $100 per month alongside bookkeeping.
Sales tax
Retailers, restaurants, and many service businesses collect and remit Florida sales tax on a schedule set by the Department of Revenue. Tracking what you collected, filing on time, and reconciling remittances against the books is real monthly work, and it shows up in the price.
Industry complexity
Orlando's economy makes this one local. Contractors riding the construction growth in the St. Cloud and Lake Nona corridors need job costing, so profit is visible per project, not just per year. Restaurants need POS reconciliation and tip handling. Manufacturers carry inventory, and inventory is where books go to die quietly: we found $22,000 in inventory accounting errors for one Orlando-area manufacturer whose file looked fine from a distance.
The state of the books today
Months of unreconciled accounts have to be fixed before monthly service means anything, and that catch-up work is its own project with its own quote. The pattern is consistent: the longer a messy file sits, the more it costs to fix.
Three Orlando Businesses, Three Different Bills
Starting prices only mean something with examples attached, so here is how the factors above stack in practice.
The solo consultant in Baldwin Park. One checking account, one credit card, forty transactions a month, no payroll, no sales tax. This is what starting prices are built for: the monthly work is reconciliation, categorization, and statements, and the bill sits at or near the $200 floor.
The restaurant near the tourist corridor. Two bank accounts, a credit card, Toast deposits arriving net of fees, fifteen employees on weekly payroll with tips, and Florida sales tax on everything. Every one of those is a real monthly workload, so the price lands well above the floor. It should, because each skipped layer here becomes a tax-season problem with interest.
The contractor in St. Cloud. Moderate transaction volume but job costing across a half-dozen active projects, subcontractors who all need 1099s, and equipment purchases that belong on the asset list for the county tangible property return. The volume says small; the structure says otherwise.
Same city, same software, three different numbers. That is why no serious firm publishes one flat price for everybody.
What a Monthly Fee Should Include
- Bank and credit card reconciliation for every account, every month, tied to statements.
- Transaction categorization reviewed by a person, not left to the bank feed's guesses.
- Monthly financial statements: a profit and loss and a balance sheet you can actually read.
- Someone to ask. A bookkeeper who answers questions in plain English is part of the service, not an upsell.
If a quote is dramatically cheaper than the market, this list is usually why. Software-only services automate the categorization and skip the review, and the errors compound silently until tax time finds them.
The Florida Discount, Sort Of
Orlando businesses catch one real break: Florida has no state income tax, so there is no state return stacked on the federal one. But the state makes up for it in filings people forget. Quarterly RT-6 reports, sales tax remittances, and the tangible personal property return due April 1 with the county property appraiser all still apply, and all of them run on the books being right.
Cleanup and Catch-Up: The Other Price Tag
If the books are behind, there are really two prices: the project that gets you current and the monthly service that keeps you there. Cleanup scope runs in rough tiers. A few months behind is mostly reconciliation catch-up and categorization. A year behind means working through every month systematically. Multiple years behind is a rebuild, and it usually surfaces because back taxes need filing or a lender asked for statements nobody can produce.
Two things should be true of any cleanup quote you accept. First, it comes after someone opened your file, not before. Second, it is flat, so the meter is the firm's problem instead of yours. That is how we run it: the file review is free, the quote is exact, and the number does not move once work starts.
What Tax Preparation Adds
Bookkeeping and tax preparation are different services, and bundling them only works when the books are actually current. Our tax preparation starts at $90 and covers individuals through S-Corps, partnerships, and LLCs, with the price scaling on complexity rather than on how long the return takes to assemble. That is the quiet payoff of clean monthly books: assembly time falls to nearly nothing, so complexity is the only thing left to pay for.
Flip that around and you get the most common pricing surprise in this business: a cheap tax quote on messy books is not cheap, because the cleanup happens anyway, priced as tax-season rush work.
What About Doing It Yourself?
DIY is genuinely free at forty transactions a month, if your time is worth nothing and the file stays simple. The real cost shows up later: an owner doing books at midnight is not selling, and errors are expensive precisely because nobody sees them happen. The contractor we mentioned in our cleanup work was down $14,500 in missed deductions before anyone looked.
There is also an upside case. A Lake Nona fitness studio came to us for verified financial statements and walked away with a $75,000 expansion loan that the old self-kept books could not support. Clean books are an asset, not an expense line.
One more DIY line item people forget: the QuickBooks Online subscription itself is yours either way. Hiring a bookkeeper does not add it, and doing it yourself does not remove it. The subscription buys you the ledger; the question this whole guide answers is what it costs to keep what goes into that ledger true.
Monthly, Quarterly, or Once a Year?
Some owners try to save money by having the books done quarterly, or in one heroic annual pass before taxes. It rarely pencils out. The work does not shrink, it just batches, and batched bookkeeping is slower per transaction because nobody remembers what that March charge was by December.
The bigger cost is invisible: a business run on quarterly books makes every pricing, hiring, and spending decision on stale numbers. Monthly service exists because the reports are only useful while the month they describe still matters.
Does a ProAdvisor Cost More?
A QuickBooks ProAdvisor is someone Intuit has certified on the software itself, and at the advanced levels, on the accounting inside it. The certification is a training signal rather than a luxury tier, and it should not carry a premium by itself. What certification actually buys you is fewer billable surprises: someone who has seen your exact QuickBooks problem before fixes it once, correctly, instead of billing you to learn on your file.
Ryan Shea holds the Level 2 ProAdvisor certification, the advanced tier, along with a Certified Payroll Specialist credential. Those are the two certifications that matter for the work this guide prices.
If You Are Switching Bookkeepers
Switching feels expensive, so owners stay in bad fits for years. In practice the moving costs are small: your new bookkeeper needs accountant access to QuickBooks Online, bank statement access for verification, and a look at the last reconciliation reports. If the outgoing bookkeeper kept clean books, onboarding is quick. If they did not, you have learned why the old price was so agreeable.
The one thing worth doing before you switch: ask your current bookkeeper for the reconciliation reports for the last three months. If they cannot produce them, the decision has made itself.
Questions to Ask Any Orlando Bookkeeper
- Is the price flat or hourly, and exactly what does it include?
- Who does the work, a person or software with a person's name on it?
- What happens to the price if my volume grows?
- Do you handle RT-6 filings, sales tax, and 1099s, or just the books?
- What do you charge to get me caught up first, and will you look at the file before quoting?
Any competent firm answers all five without flinching. If the answer to the last one is a number quoted sight unseen, keep shopping.
Common Pricing Questions, Answered Straight
Why will nobody give me a price over the phone?
Because the inputs live in your file. Transaction volume, account count, and the state of past reconciliations are facts, not conversation topics. A firm that quotes without looking is either padding the number to cover surprises or planning to renegotiate after they see the mess.
Does remote bookkeeping cost less?
The books live in QuickBooks Online either way, so remote is how most Orlando engagements already run, ours included. What you should care about is not where the bookkeeper sits but whether a specific person owns your file and answers when you call.
When does the price change?
When the business changes: a second location, first employees, a new payment processor, a move into taxable sales. A fair flat-rate firm tells you the trigger points up front so growth never turns into an invoice surprise.
Where to Go From Here
If QuickBooks itself is the question, our guide to QuickBooks ProAdvisor costs in Orlando breaks down what setup, cleanup, and ongoing ProAdvisor work runs. If you want a number for your actual business instead of a starting price, the first conversation is a free consultation: we look at your file, ask about volume and payroll, and give you an exact flat quote before anything starts.
Reach out here or call (603) 759-8547. You will get a real number, in writing, and you will hear back the same business day.