If you are a CPA firm looking to outsource bookkeeping, you will pay between $10 and $25 per hour for an offshore bookkeeper based in India or the Philippines, or $40 to $75 per hour for a US-based service. That is the range. Everything else depends on your firm size, the pricing model you choose, and how complex your clients' books are.
We publish these numbers because we think the "contact us for a custom quote" approach that most outsourcing providers use is a waste of everyone's time. You want to know what this costs before you get on a sales call. Fair enough. Here is what it actually costs, based on what we charge at Madras Accountancy and what we know our competitors charge. We also wrote about the overall cost of outsourcing accounting services if you are looking at more than just bookkeeping.
This is the most common model in offshore outsourcing. You pay a flat monthly fee for a full-time bookkeeper who works exclusively on your clients. They sit in the provider's office, use your software, and work your hours.
India-based providers like QX Accounting, Entigrity, and Madras Accountancy charge between $1,200 and $2,000 per month per FTE. Philippines-based providers like TOA Global charge $1,800 to $2,500. The difference is largely labor market pricing. Indian accountants with US GAAP training earn less than their Philippine counterparts, but the Philippines offers stronger English fluency and closer time zone overlap with the US West Coast. We broke down the offshore vs onshore cost model for teams of 5, 10, and 25 FTEs if you want to see how the numbers scale.
The per-FTE model works best when you have a consistent workload that keeps a full-time person busy. If your bookkeeper is idle 30 percent of the time, you are paying for capacity you are not using.
At Madras, we offer dedicated FTEs but we also offer more flexible arrangements because we know that most small and mid-size CPA firms do not have perfectly consistent workloads.
This is the model we use most often at Madras Accountancy, and we think it makes the most sense for CPA firms with 15 to 75 bookkeeping clients.
You pay a fixed monthly fee per client based on the client's transaction volume and complexity. A small service business with 50 transactions per month might cost $150 to $200. A retail or ecommerce client with 500 transactions costs $350 to $500. A multi-entity client with intercompany transactions and complex revenue recognition costs more.
The advantage is that your outsourcing cost scales directly with your client count. You add a client, you add the corresponding outsourcing cost. You lose a client, the cost drops. No idle capacity.
The disadvantage is that per-client pricing is typically 10 to 15 percent more expensive per transaction than the FTE model. You are paying a premium for flexibility. For most small to mid-size firms, that premium is worth it.
Hourly pricing makes sense for project work. Catch-up bookkeeping, cleanup engagements, one-time reconciliation projects. It does not make sense for recurring monthly work because neither you nor the provider can predict costs accurately, and that creates tension.
At Madras, our hourly rate for bookkeeping ranges from $12 to $20 depending on volume and complexity. For context, a staff bookkeeper in a mid-size US CPA firm earns $24 to $32 per hour in salary alone. Add benefits, payroll taxes, office space, technology, and training, and the fully loaded cost is $33 to $44 per hour.
US-based outsourced bookkeeping services like Ignite Spot charge $40 to $75 per hour. At that rate, the cost savings over hiring in-house are minimal. You are paying for the convenience of not managing a full-time employee, not for labor arbitrage.
Some providers, particularly those with heavy automation, charge per transaction. This model works for high-volume, simple bookkeeping. Think retail clients with thousands of credit card transactions per month where the work is mostly categorization and reconciliation.
Botkeeper uses a version of this model. Their AI handles the bulk categorization and human reviewers handle exceptions. Pricing works out to roughly $150 to $400 per client per month for the typical small business, which is competitive with offshore per-client pricing.
The risk is that per-transaction pricing can get expensive fast if your clients have messy books. Returns, chargebacks, manual journal entries, and intercompany transactions all add up.
The hourly or monthly rate is not the full cost of outsourcing. Here are the line items that do not show up on the invoice but show up in your profit margin.
Training and ramp-up. Budget 4 to 8 weeks for a new offshore bookkeeper to get up to speed. During that time, your senior staff is spending 5 to 10 hours per week reviewing their work, answering questions, and correcting errors. At a senior accountant's fully loaded cost of $50 to $65 per hour, that is $1,000 to $2,600 in internal cost during the ramp period. Most providers do not mention this.
Quality review time. Even after the ramp period, your onshore team needs to review offshore work. For the first 90 days, plan on reviewing 100 percent of work product. After that, most firms settle into reviewing 20 to 30 percent on a sampling basis. A reasonable estimate is 15 to 20 minutes of review time per client per month for a well-trained offshore team. That is real cost.
Management overhead. Someone at your firm needs to manage the offshore relationship. Assign tasks, conduct weekly check-ins, handle escalations, provide feedback. Budget about 1 hour per week for every 3 to 4 offshore staff. If nobody at your firm has time for this, outsourcing will fail regardless of the provider.
Technology costs. If you need to add VPN licenses, cloud desktop access, or additional user seats on your practice management software, those costs are on you. Typical range is $50 to $150 per offshore user per month.
Turnover replacement. Offshore staff turnover in India averages 15 to 25 percent annually across the outsourcing industry. When your assigned bookkeeper leaves, you go through the ramp-up process again. Some providers absorb this cost. Others do not. Ask before you sign. Our guide on the first 90 days with an offshore accounting team covers how to set up processes that survive staff transitions.
Let us walk through a specific scenario. Say you are a 12-person CPA firm with 40 monthly bookkeeping clients and 2 in-house staff bookkeepers.
Current cost with in-house staff:
2 bookkeepers at $55,000 salary each. Fully loaded (benefits, taxes, office, technology) that is roughly $75,000 per person per year. Total: $150,000 per year.
Outsourced cost with per-client pricing:
40 clients at an average of $250 per month: $10,000 per month, or $120,000 per year. Plus management overhead from your senior staff: roughly $15,000 per year. Total: $135,000 per year.
Annual savings: $15,000. That does not sound life-changing. But here is what changes the math: those 2 in-house staff positions are now freed up. You can redeploy them to higher-value advisory work, or you can choose not to replace them when they leave and pocket the full salary savings. You also gain the ability to scale. Adding 10 more bookkeeping clients does not require a new hire. It costs you an incremental $2,500 per month.
The real value of outsourcing is not just the direct labor savings. It is the capacity to grow without the headcount risk.
We tell firms not to outsource when:
Their client count is under 10 to 15. The management overhead is not justified for a small book of business. You will spend more time managing the relationship than you save on labor.
Their clients are in industries that require deep specialist knowledge. Trust accounting for law firms, fund accounting for nonprofits, job costing for construction. These can be outsourced, but they require bookkeepers with specific training, and the ramp time is significantly longer.
Their internal processes are not documented. You cannot outsource what you have not defined. If your current approach is "Sarah knows how to handle that client," you need to document Sarah's process before an offshore team can replicate it. Our outsourcing dos and don'ts for CPA firms covers the preparation steps most firms skip.
They want a fully autonomous team with zero oversight. Outsourcing is not hiring an employee and walking away. You need someone onshore reviewing the work, at least at the beginning.
We are transparent about our pricing because we think it builds trust.
Bookkeeping starts at $12 to $20 per hour depending on volume. Our per-client pricing ranges from $150 to $500 per month depending on transaction volume and complexity. Dedicated FTEs start at $1,400 per month.
No long-term contracts required. We recommend a 90-day pilot with 3 to 5 clients so you can evaluate quality before scaling up.
If you want to talk about what pricing would look like for your specific firm, reach out at madrasaccountancy.com. We will give you a straight answer, not a "let us schedule a discovery call" runaround.
India is typically 25 to 40 percent cheaper than the Philippines for comparable accounting talent. A US GAAP-trained bookkeeper in India costs $1,200 to $1,800 per month versus $1,800 to $2,500 in the Philippines. The Philippines offers stronger English fluency and better US time zone overlap. India has a larger pool of commerce graduates and chartered accountants. Your choice depends on whether cost savings or communication ease matters more to your firm.
Start with a pilot. Pick 3 to 5 clients with varying complexity. Run the pilot for 90 days with 100 percent review on all work product. Track error rates, turnaround times, and how many review notes you send back per client per month. A good offshore team should hit below a 2 percent error rate within 60 days. If they are not there by day 90, the provider is not the right fit.
This is the most underrated risk in outsourcing. When it happens, you lose institutional knowledge about your clients. Good providers maintain detailed process documentation so a replacement can get up to speed faster. Ask your provider about their documentation standards and what the typical replacement timeline looks like. At Madras, we cross-train team members and maintain client-specific runbooks to minimize the impact of turnover. We wrote about our best practices for offshore accounting teams including the documentation standards that make transitions smoother.
Yes, but with guardrails. Offshore teams can handle bank reconciliations, transaction categorization, accrual entries, and standard adjusting entries. Complex judgment calls like revenue recognition, impairment testing, and unusual transactions should stay with your onshore team. The most effective model is having the offshore team do 80 percent of the close work and your onshore reviewers handle the remaining 20 percent that requires professional judgment.
Most India-based teams work a shifted schedule that overlaps with US business hours. At Madras, our team works US Eastern or Central time depending on your preference. You get 4 to 6 hours of real-time overlap for questions, meetings, and urgent requests. The rest of the work happens during India's daytime, which means you often come in to finished work in the morning. This is actually one of the advantages of the time zone difference.
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