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 goes factor by factor, and it applies whoever you end up calling.

This guide is published by Shea Business Solutions, a QuickBooks Level 2 ProAdvisor practice in Orlando, FL. The pricing behind these numbers is set out on the flat-rate bookkeeping page, and new owners can start with the first-year finance guide for Orlando startups.

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 monthly bookkeeping, since owners budget by the month. 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, because that quote is a guess.

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 usually the first question in any honest quote, and the main reason a price moves off the starting number.

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 in the St. Cloud and Lake Nona corridors need job costing so they can see profit per project. 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. In general the longer a messy file sits, the more it costs to fix.

Three Orlando businesses, three different bills

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 real monthly work, so the price lands well above the floor, and skipping any of it tends to come back at tax time with penalties and interest attached.

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.

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 pile up until tax time.

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. With clean monthly books, assembling the return takes very little time, so complexity is mostly what you pay for.

The flip side: a cheap tax quote on messy books usually ends up costing more, because the cleanup still has to happen and it gets done as tax-season rush work.

What about doing it yourself?

DIY is free at forty transactions a month if your time is worth nothing and the file stays simple. The cost comes later. Hours spent on the books at midnight aren't hours spent selling, and nobody catches the errors as they happen. The contractor we mentioned in our cleanup work was down $14,500 in missed deductions before anyone looked.

It cuts the other way too. 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.

One more DIY line item people forget: the QuickBooks Online subscription is yours to pay whether you hire a bookkeeper or not.

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.

A business run on quarterly books is also making its pricing, hiring and spending calls on numbers that are months old.

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. It's a training credential and shouldn't carry a premium by itself. Where it helps is billable time, because someone who has already seen your QuickBooks problem usually fixes it once, without learning 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 can't, start looking.

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?

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 have to be looked at, and 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. The thing to check is whether one 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.