At some point the spare-evening approach stops working and the question becomes: hire someone, or send it out?
The comparison usually gets made on price, which is the least useful axis. Here is what actually differs.
The true cost of in-house
A competent full-charge bookkeeper is a real salary, and the salary is roughly 70–75% of the cost. Add payroll taxes, benefits, workers' comp, software licences, a workstation, and the management time to supervise someone whose work you may not be equipped to review.
The larger problem is fit. Most small businesses do not have 40 hours of bookkeeping a week. They have somewhere between 8 and 20. So the role gets padded with adjacent work — admin, scheduling, customer service — and you have hired a generalist doing bookkeeping part-time rather than a bookkeeper.
That is fine until it is not. The padding is where errors come from, because the bookkeeping gets done in the gaps between other duties.
The concentration risk nobody prices
One person holding all the access, all the context, and all the undocumented conventions is a genuine single point of failure. They go on holiday and the close does not happen. They leave and you discover the subscription was in their name.
It is also, bluntly, where small-business fraud happens. Not because bookkeepers are dishonest, but because the structural conditions — one person recording transactions, reconciling the accounts they recorded, and preparing the reports management reviews — remove every natural check. Almost every case follows the same shape, and it is usually discovered by accident.
You can mitigate that with segregation of duties, but segregating duties requires more than one person, which is exactly what a small business does not have.
What outsourcing actually buys
Not primarily cost. Three other things.
Range. A firm has seen your situation before, across many businesses. When something unusual comes up — a nexus question, a multi-entity structure, a messy migration — that is a known problem rather than a research project.
Continuity. Holidays, illness, and departures are the firm's problem to absorb. The close happens regardless.
A second set of eyes by default. The person doing the work is not the only person who ever sees it.
Where in-house genuinely wins
It does win, in specific situations, and it is worth being straight about them.
High transaction volume with lots of daily judgement — a busy retail or restaurant operation where someone needs to be on the floor and in the file — favours in-house. So does deep operational integration, where the bookkeeper is also handling purchasing or scheduling and the roles genuinely inform each other. So does needing someone physically present for cash handling.
And beyond a certain scale, you want both: an internal controller who owns the numbers, with outside support for specialist work.
The comparison worth running
Not salary versus fee. Compare total cost of employment — salary, taxes, benefits, software, supervision — against the outsourced fee, and then ask what happens to each in three specific scenarios: the person is off for three weeks, volume doubles, and volume halves.
In-house is fixed against all three. Outsourced flexes with two of them and absorbs the first.
Our pricing is published so you can run that comparison without a sales conversation. And if the honest answer is in-house, the useful middle path is worth knowing about: plenty of firms keep day-to-day entry internal and bring us in for the monthly close and reconciliation — the parts where a second set of eyes is worth the most.
Behind on Your Books?
We handle your bookkeeping end-to-end — categorization, reconciliation, month-end close, and clean financial statements, so your books stay current and CPA-ready.