What does a bookkeeper do each month: the scope sheet
- Whole monthly scope, in hours (rounded)
- 13
- Coding and matching transactions (minutes a month)
- 300
- Reconciling every account (minutes a month)
- 90
- Raising and chasing customer invoices (minutes a month)
- 60
The record-keeping periods these pages cite are the IRS's published figures; every fee, hour and rate is arithmetic on the numbers you typed, and no figure on this site is a published national price for bookkeeping, because there is none.
These figures are a worked example (13) for one small business; type your own counts and the quote-side arithmetic follows.
Download the What does a bookkeeper do each month: the scope sheet worked example (CSV)
What does a bookkeeper do each month depends on what your business gives them to do, so this sheet asks for exactly that: the accounts you hold, the transactions that go through them, the invoices you raise, the bills you pay, the payroll runs somebody else processes, and the sales channels that settle in batches. For each it shows the monthly work in minutes, coding and matching, reconciling every account, raising and chasing invoices, entering bills, posting payroll journals, matching channel settlements, and the month-end reports, and adds them to the hours the whole scope takes. It also counts the items you hand over each month, which is the list a new bookkeeper will ask you for in the first week.
What an owner comparing bookkeeping quotes asks about the What does a bookkeeper do each month: the scope sheet
Does a bookkeeper run payroll?
Usually not. A payroll provider runs it; the bookkeeper posts the payroll journal to the books and reconciles the liabilities, which is what the payroll line on this sheet costs. If you want the bookkeeper to run payroll, that is a separate service with its own price.
What does a bookkeeper not do?
Prepare tax returns, give tax or accounting advice, audit anything, or decide what a transaction was. The last one is the owner's job: a bookkeeper can only code what they are told, and unanswered questions are why books fall behind.
What do I hand over each month?
A statement for every account, a settlement report for every sales channel, the payroll summary if there is one, and the sales invoices and supplier bills. The sheet counts them from your inputs, and a bookkeeper who has them all by the fifth of the month can close by the fifteenth.
Where the constants in this tool come from
IRS: Recordkeeping for small businesses.
IRS Publication 583: Starting a business and keeping records.