Live Expert Assisted doesn’t include cleanup of your books or a dedicated bookkeeper reconciling your accounts and maintaining your books for you. Live Expert Assisted also doesn’t include any financial advisory services, tax advice, facilitating the filing of income or sales tax returns, creating or sending 1099s, or management of payroll. QuickBooks Live Bookkeeping offers online bookkeeping services that connect small businesses with trusted, QuickBooks-certified virtual bookkeepers. Depending on the service you choose, a bookkeeper can give you guidance or take the lead on your bookkeeping. Its bookkeeping service comes with its Enterprise plan, which costs $399 per month when billed annually. You’ll get a dedicated accountant, year-round tax advice, tax prep, bookkeeping and financial reports.
Best for Startups
Aside from staying compliant, having organized books helps you monitor the health of your business, prepare for tax time, and prepare key financial statements. It will be a lot harder to work with a virtual bookkeeper if you use QuickBooks and they use FreshBooks or Xero. Therefore, make sure you ask them which accounting app they use for their business and why.
Some of the apps might be different, but if your prospective virtual bookkeeping service can cover these five bases, then there is a good chance you’re covered. It can be difficult to trust a virtual service with your books, and even harder to know which service to choose. To help ease the process, I’ll show you how I run my virtual bookkeeping service and explain what to look for in these services, so you can make the best decision possible. Bookkeeper360 is best for businesses that occasionally need bookkeeping services as well as those that want integrations with third-party tools. The virtual bookkeeping providers above might be our favorite—but if they don’t quite fit your needs, we understand completely. Here are three other online accounting service providers worth looking at.
The top virtual bookkeeping services
You can also book a call with your bookkeeper (or send them a message) whenever you’d like. There’s no extra fee or hourly charges for investments support—we’re always happy to nerd out about bookkeeping and your financial statements. For pricing, $210 a month gets you 5 hours of an administrative assistant to handle your books. For bigger businesses, the price increases as more hours of work are required. Equivity offers a range of virtual services for businesses—from administrative assistants to paralegals. Virtual services are more sophisticated than individual freelancers.
We reviewed multiple accounting software options using what is weighted marginal cost? a detailed methodology to help you find the 9 best online bookkeeping services for small businesses. Our ratings considered everything from pricing and customer reviews to the number and quality of features available and what our panel of experts thought about the services available. Bookkeeper.com’s cheapest virtual bookkeeping service starts with bookkeeping basics, like preparing key financial statements. From there, you can add comprehensive accounting, payroll, and tax services as needed. Bookkeeper.com manages your accounts using QuickBooks Online (or QuickBooks Desktop, if you prefer). Plus, not every online bookkeeping service works with both accrual-basis and cash-basis accounting—but Bookkeeper.com does.
Compare runner-up bookkeeping service features
- QuickBooks Live is an online bookkeeping service that connects small businesses with trusted, QuickBooks-certified virtual bookkeepers.
- If they are using different software and tools, you should figure out why and use that to determine if you really want to work with them.
- QuickBooks, Xero and other do-it-yourself bookkeeping software give you a tool to do your own bookkeeping and taxes.
- Each customer’s main point of contact is a dedicated in-house, professionally-trained bookkeeper, based in North America.
As an insider in the cloud accounting world, I can tell you that many virtual bookkeeping services don’t follow the best practices that have been listed above. If you don’t walk away from your initial interactions what causes an inventory turnover increase with your prospective virtual bookkeeping service feeling 100% confident that this company has your back, then just say no. It’s also ideal for brand-new businesses because FinancePal can help with entity formation.
Best Online Bookkeeping Services of 2024
An expert can guide you through QBO setup and answer questions based on the information you provide; some bookkeeping services may not be included and determined by the expert. For more information about Expert Assisted, refer to the QuickBooks Terms of Service. Online bookkeeping services can save business owners both time and money. However, with hundreds of options, it can be daunting to sort through them all and find the best service for your business. Forbes Advisor analyzed the best bookkeeping services to help you find the right solution quickly and easily. We selected these services based on their service options, pricing, customer service, reputation and more.
Bookkeeping services can also help small business owners save more through tax preparation and tax filing. When your business is still growing, bookkeeping isn’t such a cumbersome task. But as the business gets larger, it can start to become a very time-consuming job.