The short answer, then the honest one
For a small Texas contractor, monthly bookkeeping runs roughly $150 to $600 a month, depending on volume and how clean your records already are. Hourly help lands somewhere around $40 to $90 an hour. An in-house hire costs far more once you add payroll taxes, software, and the hours you spend managing them. Those are the ballpark numbers everyone wants first.
The honest answer is that the monthly figure is the small one. The expensive version of bookkeeping is the year you fall behind, miss deductions, and can’t answer a banker — not the couple hundred dollars a month it takes to keep the books current. Price the service against what messy books cost you, not against zero.
This guide breaks down what you actually pay under each model, the three things that move the number up or down, and how to tell whether a low quote is a deal or a warning. If you’d rather skip to a real figure for your own books, our flat monthly pricing lays it out in plain dollars.
- Every question has a price, so you stop asking
- Messier books = bigger bill (backwards incentive)
- Cost swings month to month, hard to budget
- Known number, calls cost you nothing extra
- Clean books are faster — incentives line up
- Same figure every month, easy to plan around
The three things that move the price
First is transaction volume. A one-truck operation running eighty transactions a month is a different job than a crew of twelve running four hundred. More bank feeds, more cards, more invoices to match — more time. Volume is the honest driver, and any bookkeeper worth hiring will ask about it before quoting a number.
Second is how tangled your records already are. If your books are current and reconciled, monthly upkeep is cheap. If they’re six months behind or half-migrated between two software files, someone has to fix that before the monthly rhythm even starts. That fix is a one-time cleanup, quoted separately, so a bad past doesn’t inflate your monthly rate forever.
Third is scope. Pure bookkeeping — categorizing, reconciling, and handing you clean statements — sits at the low end. Add payroll, receivables chasing, job costing, or a monthly review call and the price climbs, because you’re buying more work and more judgment. The trick is matching scope to what you’ll actually use, not paying for a service tier you’ll never open.
Hourly vs. flat monthly — why the meter hurts you
Hourly billing looks cheaper on the quote and costs more in practice. When the meter runs, every question you ask has a price, so you stop asking. You go quiet, the books drift, and the relationship turns into a transaction instead of a partnership. Worse, the messier your books get, the more the hourly bookkeeper earns to untangle them — the incentive points the wrong way.
A flat monthly rate flips that. The scope is set, the number is known, and picking up the phone costs you nothing extra. You use the service the way it’s meant to be used — early and often — and the bookkeeper is rewarded for keeping things clean, because clean is faster. That’s the model behind our monthly bookkeeping service, and it’s the one that fits a contractor’s cash flow.
There’s a place for hourly work: a defined project with a clear end. But ongoing books are not a project — they’re a rhythm. Paying by the hour for a rhythm is how owners end up rationing the one service that’s supposed to make everything else clearer.
When a low quote is actually a warning
A quote well under market usually means one of two things. Either the work is going offshore to someone who’s never seen a Texas job cost and won’t pick up when the bank calls, or the low number is a door-opener that climbs the moment your books turn out to be normal-messy. Cheap bookkeeping that misses a reconciliation isn’t a bargain — it’s a future cleanup you’ll pay for twice.
The other hidden cost is silence. A bargain provider categorizes and disappears. You get a file, not a read on your business. When margins slip on a job, nobody tells you, because nobody’s looking — they’re processing, not thinking. The point of bookkeeping isn’t tidy records for their own sake; it’s knowing where you stand in time to do something about it.
Judge a quote on what it prevents, not just what it costs. Books that are current, reconciled, and actually read are the ones that get you a loan, a clean tax season, and an honest answer about which work makes money.
Should you just do it yourself?
Plenty of owners run their own books for a while, and early on that’s fine. The question isn’t whether you can — it’s what your time is worth on the tools versus in the software. If you bill $85 an hour in the field and spend six hours a month wrestling bank feeds, you’re paying yourself $500 to do a job you could hand off for less, badly.
The other cost of do-it-yourself is the mistakes you can’t see. Miscategorized draws, missed reconciliations, and receivables that quietly age past ninety days don’t announce themselves — they surface at tax time or when a banker asks a question you can’t answer. By then the fix is a cleanup, not a correction.
The clean handoff point is usually the same for everyone: the month your books stopped being something you keep up with and started being something you avoid. That’s the signal to price the service out for real.
What a fair price actually buys
A fair monthly price should buy current, reconciled books, statements you can hand to a lender without flinching, and a human who answers when you call. Our Books Right service starts at $159 a month right now — a special rate, normally $300 — and it exists to keep the books quietly current so you never do the three-year panic version again.
If your books need a rebuild before the monthly rhythm can start, that’s a fixed-quote cleanup, priced up front so you know the whole number before anyone touches the file. And if you eventually need someone reading the numbers — margins, pricing, cash flow — that’s a step up into fractional CFO work, not something you should be paying bookkeeper rates to fake.
The right price is the one matched to your actual volume and mess, quoted as a flat number, from someone who’ll still be on the other end of the phone in March. Call (254) 556-5277 and we’ll put a real figure on your books in about fifteen minutes.
Related: What a fractional CFO actually does · How to choose a bookkeeper in Central Texas