Bookkeeping Cleanup Pricing.

The band, and what moves you inside it

A quiet cleanup — one account, statements all present, nothing reconciled but nothing hidden — sits at the low end per month of backlog. Each complication moves the price up the band: personal and business money mixed in one account, missing statements, sales tax collected but never filed, payroll tangled into the mess. Complexity, not the client's revenue, is what the band prices. Quote the month-of-backlog figure out loud in your proposal; a client who can see the grounding argues less.

The estimator shape

Firms price cleanups the way our calculator does: a base per-month rate for the transaction volume, multiplied by an accounts factor (more bank and card accounts, more matching work) and a mess factor (each complication adds its share). Run the same shape by hand once, on paper, before you trust any tool with it — the point of a formula is that you can defend every line of it on a discovery call.

Flat price, hourly cross-check

Quote one flat project price — never hourly. Hourly punishes you for getting faster and invites the client to watch a clock instead of a result. Use the $75–$150/hr band only as a cross-check: divide your flat price by your honest hour estimate, and if the result lands far outside the band, the scope is wrong. Fix the scope, in writing, before the work starts.