This decision is usually framed as a salary against a monthly fee, and framed that way it is not a fair comparison. An employee costs considerably more than their salary, and an outsourced service provides something an individual employee structurally cannot. Both of those need to be in the picture.
No dollar figures appear below. Rates vary by market and by scope, and a comparison built on invented numbers would be worse than none. What follows is the structure of the comparison — apply your own figures to it.
What an in-house bookkeeper actually costs
- Salary, which is the part everyone counts
- The employer share of payroll taxes on top of it
- Benefits, where offered — health cover, retirement contributions, paid leave
- Workers compensation and unemployment insurance
- Software licenses, and a workstation and desk
- Recruitment cost, and the time you spend on it
- Training, and supervision by someone who understands the work
- Paid time when there is not a full workload to fill
The last two are where the comparison usually turns. A small business rarely has forty hours of bookkeeping a week, so a full-time hire is partly idle or partly doing something else. And supervision assumes someone in the business can tell good work from bad — which, if you are hiring a bookkeeper because you do not want to do bookkeeping, is often not the case.
What outsourcing costs
A fee, scaled to volume and scope, with no employment costs attached. You are buying output rather than hours, which means you pay for the work your business actually generates rather than for a person’s availability.
The trade-off is immediacy. An in-house bookkeeper is down the hall and knows the business by osmosis. An outsourced service works to a defined scope and rhythm, and questions get answered on a cycle rather than instantly. For most small businesses that is a modest cost; for some it genuinely matters.
The structural difference nobody prices
A single in-house bookkeeper is a single point of failure and a single point of control. They take holidays, they leave, and when they do the knowledge frequently leaves with them.
More seriously, one person handling all of the money with no independent review is the standard precondition for the losses small businesses suffer at the hands of long-trusted staff. It is not a comment on any individual — it is a comment on a structure without separation of duties. A firm has other people looking at the work as a matter of course.
There is also a competence range issue. Bookkeeping spans a wide spectrum, and an individual hire is a bet on one person’s level. A firm covers a range, and knows when something needs escalating.
When in-house genuinely wins
- Transaction volume is high enough to occupy a real role
- The work requires constant availability — daily job costing, live inventory, immediate customer queries
- The role is broader than bookkeeping, combining it with administration or operations
- The business is large enough to maintain some separation of duties internally
That last condition is the one most often missed. Once there are two people, oversight becomes possible. With one, it does not.
The hybrid most small businesses land on
A common and sensible arrangement: someone in-house or part-time handles day-to-day capture — invoicing, receipts, chasing payment — and an outside firm handles reconciliation, month-end, payroll and reporting.
That gets the immediacy of internal capture, the review that comes from an outside party looking at the numbers, and no full-time salary. It is also naturally scalable — the internal side grows with the business while the external scope stays roughly constant.
About the author
Latoya Clark
Latoya Clark founded Elite Pro-Tax & Financial Services to give individuals and small business owners in the Upstate straightforward, year-round tax and bookkeeping support — not just a filing service that disappears in April.
More about Elite Pro-Tax →