What does catch-up bookkeeping cost?
If you are months or years behind, the honest answer is that nobody can tell you the price from a conversation alone — and anybody who does is either padding the number to cover the risk, or is about to revise it once they open the file. What follows is what actually drives the fee, so you can judge whether a quote is fair.
The four things that set the price
- How far behind you are. Obvious, but it is the least important of the four. Twelve tidy months costs far less than three chaotic ones.
- Transaction volume. A consultancy with forty bank lines a month is a different job from a shop with four hundred. This is what most hourly quotes are really estimating.
- The state of the records. The big one. Reconciled bank feeds with receipts attached is data entry. Unreconciled accounts, missing invoices and a director paying company costs personally is investigation, and investigation is where the hours go.
- What has to be corrected, not just entered. If previous years were closed on wrong numbers — stock that never moved, a suspense account nobody cleared, purchases treated as expenses that were really assets — then the catch-up includes fixing history, not just recording it.
Roughly what to expect
UK market rates for bookkeepers typically run somewhere between £25 and £60 an hour, with qualified accountants higher. Rather than quote you a total that will be wrong, here is how the same twelve months differs by condition:
| Condition of records | What the work is | Relative cost |
|---|---|---|
| Tidy but unposted | Straight data entry, bank reconciles first time | Baseline |
| Partly reconciled | Entry plus chasing gaps and missing paperwork | 2–3× baseline |
| Genuinely messy | Investigation, corrections, rebuilding balances | 4–8× baseline |
| Messy plus wrong history | All of the above, plus restating prior periods | Priced as a project, not hourly |
Why two quotes for the same books differ by thousands
Because they are pricing different amounts of uncertainty. A bookkeeper who has seen your trial balance and your transaction listing knows what they are taking on and can price it tightly. One working from your description has to price the worst case, or price optimistically and come back for more later. Neither is dishonest — the difference is information.
That is also why the cheapest quote is frequently not the cheapest job. A fee that assumes tidy books will be revised the moment the suspense account or the director’s loan account turns up.
How to get a fair price
- Find out the state of your books first, before you ask anyone. Then you are negotiating with facts instead of hoping.
- Give every quoter the same information. Export your trial balance and account transactions from your accounting system and send them to each. Quotes become comparable immediately.
- Ask what happens if it is worse than expected. A good answer is a defined trigger and a revised estimate. A bad answer is silence.
- Separate the catch-up from the ongoing work. One is a project with an end; the other is a monthly fee. Bundling them hides both.
- Expect to fix history too. If earlier years were filed on numbers that were wrong, correcting them is part of the job and should be priced openly.
Find out what state your books are in — free, in about a minute
Export your trial balance from Xero and drop it into the free Vigil Health Check. You get a score out of 100 and a plain-English list of what needs attention — suspense balances, director’s loan issues, missing stock, impossible margins. Nothing is uploaded: the analysis runs in your own browser. Take the one-page report to your bookkeeper and you will get a far better quote than a description could ever produce.
Check your books free →Built and used in practice by Peter Edwards ACMA CGMA · Insight Professional Partners Ltd (CIMA MiP)
Related: How practitioners price cleanup work · What’s really in “sundry expenses” · The stock figure that never moves