In-house bookkeeper vs. outsourced bookkeeping
When your books outgrow doing it yourself, the next question is how to get help: hire someone in-house, or outsource to a firm? Both work, but they cost and feel very different. Here’s an honest comparison to help you decide.
The real cost of an in-house bookkeeper
The sticker price of an in-house hire is the salary, but that’s rarely the whole story. When people compare options, they often weigh a bookkeeper’s salary against an outsourced fee and stop there. The fairer comparison includes everything that comes with an employee:
What an in-house bookkeeper really costs
- SalaryThe base wage
- Payroll taxes+ ~7.65% employer share
- BenefitsHealth, PTO, retirement
- Software & toolsQuickBooks, apps, subscriptions
- Hiring & trainingTime and cost to onboard
- Your management timeSupervising and reviewing their work
Add it up and the true cost of an in-house bookkeeper is well above the salary line alone, often enough to give a single business owner pause.
There’s also the part that doesn’t show up on a spreadsheet: when your one bookkeeper is out sick, on vacation, or quits, your books stop, and the knowledge often walks out the door with them.
What outsourcing changes
Outsourcing replaces a salaried employee with a service: you pay a predictable fee, and a firm handles the work. The cost is usually a fraction of a full in-house hire for a small business, because you’re sharing an experienced team rather than employing one person full-time. You also don’t carry the benefits, the management, or the risk of turnover.
The trade-off is real and worth naming: an in-house person sits in your office and knows your business intimately day to day, which some larger operations genuinely need. For most small businesses, though, that closeness isn’t worth several times the cost.
In-house bookkeeper
- Dedicated solely to your business
- Deep day-to-day familiarity with operations
- On hand for in-person, same-day questions
- Can take on other office tasks beyond the books
- Salary plus benefits, payroll taxes, software, and overhead
- One person; work stops if they’re out or quit
- You manage, train, and review their work
- A single person’s skill may not cover every area
Outsourced bookkeeping
- Predictable fee, no employer overhead or benefits
- A whole team, not a single point of failure
- Coverage continues through sick days and turnover
- The work is managed and reviewed for you
- Not physically in your office
- Access and documents are handled online rather than in person
- Replies come within business hours, not instantly down the hall
- Focused on the books, not general office tasks
A note on security: handling things online doesn’t mean handling them less safely. As a fully virtual firm, secure access is something we built around from the start. Documents are shared through a secure client portal rather than email, so your sensitive information stays protected. For most businesses, online access turns out to be more organized and more secure than paper changing hands in an office.
So which makes sense?
For a large company with high transaction volume and complex daily needs, a dedicated in-house team can be worth it. For most small businesses, outsourcing delivers the same accurate books and monthly reporting for a fraction of the cost, with a team behind it instead of a single hire. The math tends to favor outsourcing until you’re quite large.
If you’re weighing this, it’s worth seeing what outsourced bookkeeping actually runs before you assume an in-house hire is comparable. Our bookkeeping pricing is published openly, so you can put a real number next to the in-house cost you’d otherwise carry.
Curious how the numbers compare for your business?
Tell us a bit about your books and we’ll give you a clear, no-obligation estimate, so you can compare it side by side with what an in-house hire would cost you.