How much does bookkeeping cost in Phoenix?

The short answer

Our published monthly plans start at $450 a month for Essentials, $850 for Growth, $1,650 for Scale, and from $2,800 for Advisory+. That is the fee for the bookkeeping and accounting work itself, quoted flat and agreed before we start — not an hourly rate that moves with how busy the month was.

If your books are behind, catch-up work is quoted separately at $375 per month of books behind, with a $1,500 minimum engagement. Payroll is $85/month + $12 per employee. The business tax subscription is +$195/month. Add 2 or more specialist services to a plan and the bundle discount takes 10% off the flat monthly fees.

Everything below is about which of those bands you land in, and why two Phoenix businesses with similar revenue can sit two tiers apart.

Revenue is the worst predictor of bookkeeping cost

Owners almost always ask the question as 'we do about X a year, what would you charge?' — and revenue turns out to be one of the weakest signals available. A consultancy billing seven figures from twelve invoices a year is a far smaller bookkeeping job than a restaurant a tenth the size running daily deposits, tip allocations, vendor invoices and three payment processors.

What actually drives the work is the number of transactions and the number of places they come from. Every bank account, card, merchant processor, lending facility and payables system is another feed to reconcile and another place a discrepancy can hide.

The five things that actually move the number

Transaction volume and account count. This is the base load: how many lines have to be categorised, matched and reconciled each month, and across how many feeds.

Entity and location count. Two entities is not twice one entity in complexity terms, but it is close in time terms — separate closes, separate reconciliations, and inter-company activity that has to agree in both directions.

Cash or accrual. Accrual books with deferred revenue, prepaid expenses, accrued liabilities and proper cut-off are meaningfully more work than cash-basis bookkeeping, and they are what a lender, investor or acquirer will expect to see.

Payroll and workforce shape. A team of six salaried staff is straightforward. Hourly crews with overtime, multi-state employees, contractor mixes and tipped roles all add reconciliation work between the payroll system and the ledger.

State and local filing exposure. Arizona transaction privilege tax is the common one in Phoenix, and whether it applies, at what frequency, and whether you have city-level obligations depends on your activity. Confirm your rates and filing frequency with the Arizona Department of Revenue — we file against what is in force, not a figure from an article.

Why catch-up is priced separately

Cleaning up back months is different work from keeping current books current: it is forensic, the source documents are often incomplete, and the answer to 'what was this payment for' frequently lives in somebody's memory. We price it at $375 per month of books behind with a $1,500 minimum, quoted as a flat fee in writing before any work starts.

It is worth doing before anything else. A monthly service running on top of an unreliable opening balance produces reports nobody can act on, and the cost of unpicking that later is always higher than the cost of fixing it once at the start.

What the monthly fee includes — and what it does not

Every plan includes the bookkeeping itself: bank and card reconciliation, categorisation, the monthly close, and financial statements delivered by business day 5. Higher tiers add accounts payable and receivable workflow, tighter reporting, accrual treatment and advisory time.

It does not include payroll processing, the business tax subscription, medical billing, CFO work, or one-off projects such as catch-up, entity formation or a business plan. Those are priced on their own so you are not paying a blended fee for work you do not use — and so the bundle discount is a real reduction rather than a repackaging.

Flat fee versus hourly, in practice

Hourly billing puts the risk of an unusual month on the client and rewards slow work. A flat published fee puts the risk on us and rewards getting the process clean. It also makes the number budgetable, which matters more to most owners than the headline rate.

The trade is that a flat fee has to be scoped honestly. We size the plan on your actual volumes and complexity before quoting, and if the business changes materially — a second location, a new payroll population, an acquisition — we re-scope openly rather than absorbing it quietly and cutting corners.

A realistic way to estimate your own fee

Count your monthly transactions, your bank and card accounts, your entities, your headcount, and whether you need accrual books. Then run those through the estimator: it uses the same published rates as this article and produces a figure you can take into a conversation.

Treat the result as a starting point rather than a quote. We confirm the final fee in writing after a short review of your actual books, and nothing is charged before you have agreed it.

What we would ask you before quoting

How many months are behind, if any. What systems you already run. How many accounts and entities are involved. Whether payroll, TPT or medical billing are in scope. What reporting you actually use — and what you currently look at but do not trust.

That conversation takes about half an hour and it is free. It also tends to surface the real problem, which in a surprising number of cases is not the bookkeeping fee at all but a reporting gap nobody has been able to close.

Figures in this article are estimates until confirmed in writing

The plan rates above are our published prices and they are current. What they do not do is price your specific business: the final fee depends on the factors listed here, and it is confirmed in writing after a consultation and a look at your books. No engagement begins, and nothing is billed, before you have that in hand.

Cancellation is 30 days' notice, and your files are returned within 5 business days of the engagement ending.