The Cost of E-Commerce Accounting: How much should you expect to pay for an outsourced accounting service?

More posts in this series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

For the past few weeks, we’ve been breaking down the pricing model for an e-commerce accounting firm. And today, we’ve got the post you’ve been waiting for: how much you should expect to pay for your outsourced service.

There are two different basic services that all firms are likely to offer: a clean up service and a recurring accounting service. Many businesses decide to hire a firm for both services, especially if they’re coming from a situation where they were previously doing their own bookkeeping, or if their current system could use some organization, as it may after purchasing an existing business.

Clean Up Services

A clean up service is likely to be the cheaper of these two options, since it is a one-time payment for a single project.

Accounting clean up includes reconciling past months’ data, closing old accounts, setting up bank feed automations, organizing purchases into the correct spending categories, and creating readable investor documents, such as balance sheets and P&L statements.

Seller Accountant generally only offers clean up services to existing monthly clients as

You can expect to pay between $500 and $5,000 total for an accounting clean up project. These prices vary widely based on how many months of clean up are needed on top of the complexity of the accounting as outlined in our previous posts.

Recurring Accounting

The other service every firm offers is recurring accounting.

Recurring accounting is exactly what it sounds like: a firm will take on the full responsibility for your bookkeeping and continue to reconcile your data on an ongoing basis. Most accounting is reconciled monthly, as most owners and investors analyze financial trends on a monthly basis, but there are clients at Seller Accountant who prefer quarterly reconciliation instead. Weekly reconciliation is usually not possible given the long cash cycle in the e-commerce market; most sales platforms only pay out on a biweekly basis.

Your outsourced firm will bill you for recurring accounting in one of two ways, either with a fixed rate per period (usually weekly or monthly) or at an hourly rate, resulting in an invoice being sent to you each month.

While many firms and solo accountants choose to price their services hourly, Seller Accountant strongly prefers a fixed rate system.

It’s easy to see how charging an hourly rate rewards inefficiency, since taking longer to finish a reconciliation will result in more billable hours for the firm. We believe that our clients get the best value when they see themselves paying for our services rather than our time and because of this, charging a fixed price better aligns with our company values.

As Seller Accountant becomes more efficient in completing ongoing projects, our clients will proportionally grow in size and complexity. A fixed price system best accounts for both of these changes.

You can expect to pay anywhere from $600 to $6,000 per month for ongoing monthly accounting, based on account complexity and accessibility.

Whether you’re ready to outsource your accounting or would like to try it on your own before you make the leap, we hope you’ll consider working with Seller Accountant for your bookkeeping needs.

Check out the other posts in this series:

What does it take to do e-commerce accounting correctly?
What drives the price of an outsourced service?
How should you optimize your business for outsourcing?