How much should I pay for book-keeping and payroll services for my small business?

To some degree, the fee you pay does depend on the locality in which your small business is located. The pricing of bookkeeping services is quite competitive in the marketplace.

The major factor, though, is the volume of bookkeeping work your business generates, including the number of employees you have, the volume of your payroll per period and payroll period frequency (which, together, determines your payroll tax reporting requirement).

The monthly fee for an outside accountant to perform your monthly small business bookkeeping could range anywhere from $125 to $650 and up, totally depending on the nature and volume of the services performed.

Alternately, you may hire a part-time employee, at $10 to $15 an hour, but the workload is only going to be between 3 hours to 10 hours, or so, per month. If you go that route, and you find someone who is willing to be your employee for so few hours, per month, you will want to make sure you have good quality internal controls in place to mitigate the probablility of a life-disgruntled employee embezzling from your business, etc. Given too much discretion, a bookkeeper is in a good place to temporarily benefit from access to your money!

Phil
http://www.phillipfostercpa.com/accounti...

I pay $350 a month but a lot will depend on where you live

$10 an hour.

What do you do?

The bigger question is what return can I get from a good adviser?

Keep the 2 issues separate though, i.e. pay good accoutants for value added advise, and make sure they don't charge 'advice' rates for data entry.

If you are really a 'small' business you may be better off investing in training to learn to do it yourself, otherwise you'll overpay, or, worse, be let down by your 'trusted' bookkeeper's lack of knowledge/integrity.

And, it depends on how much you have them do. One of my clients pays $1500 per month, but they have 30 employees.

It really depends on what area you are in and how many employees you have.

I work at a CPA firm and we charge about $30.00 per payroll to process the payroll for a small business with just a few employees.

For full-service it is about $250.00 to $300.00 a month to process payroll, do the payroll taxes and sales taxes, balance the monthly bank account and provide a monthly financial statement.