What bookkeeping actually costs in Rhode Island

The short answer

For a small Rhode Island business with one or two bank accounts and modest volume, ongoing monthly bookkeeping generally starts in the low hundreds per month. Faro publishes its own entry rate — $350 a month — because you should be able to see what bookkeeping costs before you get on a call to find out.

That number is the floor, not the answer. What moves it is volume, the number of accounts, and the state the books are in when you arrive.

The four things that actually drive the price

• Transaction volume. The single biggest driver. Fifty transactions a month and four hundred are not the same job, and no honest quote treats them as one. Ask any bookkeeper what volume their quoted price assumes, and what happens when you cross it.
• How many accounts have to reconcile. Reconciliation means matching your books to the bank statement line by line until they agree. Each additional checking account, credit card, loan, or payment processor is another reconciliation every month, every month forever.
• What condition the books are in on day one. This is the one that surprises people. Cleaning up eighteen months of uncategorised transactions is a project, not a monthly service, and it should be quoted and billed separately. If a quote for ongoing work silently absorbs a cleanup, one of two things is true: the cleanup is not really happening, or the monthly price is carrying it and will feel wrong to somebody within a quarter.
• Complexity that is real, not decorative. Multiple entities. Rental property tracked per unit. Inventory. Payroll. Income that crosses a border. Each one is genuine additional work. None of them is a reason for a vague price.

Why flat monthly, and why never hourly

Hourly billing puts the bookkeeper and the client on opposite sides of the same clock. Every question you ask costs you money, so you ask fewer. Every efficiency gained costs the bookkeeper money, so there is no reason to find one. Neither of those is what either party wants.

A flat monthly fee, quoted in writing before any work starts, removes both problems at once. You know the number. Asking a question is free. And if the work gets faster because a process improved, that is a gain rather than a pay cut.

The honest cost of flat pricing, stated plainly: it requires the scope to be written down. That is a feature. A scope nobody wrote down is a disagreement waiting for a busy month.

How to compare two quotes that look nothing alike

Ask all five of these, in writing:

• What transaction volume does this price assume, and what happens above it? — Faro publishes the number on every plan, and moves you a tier rather than charging an overage. See pricing.
• Is a cleanup of my existing books included, or quoted separately?
• Which reports do I get, and by what day of the month? — Faro's answer is the month closed and explained by the 15th.
• Who pays for the QuickBooks subscription, and whose name is on the file? It should be yours. A file in the bookkeeper's name is leverage over you.
• What happens if I leave? You want your file, in your name, handed over without an argument.

Bookkeeper, accountant, CPA — they are not interchangeable

A bookkeeper records and reconciles what happened, and produces the statements that describe it. A CPA is licensed by the state and can do things a bookkeeper cannot, including issuing audited, reviewed or compiled financial statements. Preparing your federal return for a fee requires an IRS PTIN, and representing you before the IRS requires an enrolled agent, CPA, or attorney.

Faro is a bookkeeping practice. It does not issue audited, reviewed or compiled statements, does not prepare returns, and does not represent anyone before the IRS. Clean books handed to whoever does your return is the deliverable, and for most small businesses that is exactly the piece that is missing.

See the published rates