Outsourced Bookkeeping Costs in the UK: Practice, In-House or Dedicated Remote Bookkeeper

Bookkeeping is one of the first finance tasks a growing business hands to someone else, and one of the hardest to price from the outside. Fixed monthly packages from accountancy practices, hourly freelancers, part-time staff and full-time hires all quote on different bases. The useful comparison is not the headline fee but what each option costs for your volume of work, and what it leaves for you or your accountant to do.

This guide explains what drives the cost, sets out the three main options for a UK business, and shows how Remoteli prices a dedicated Bookkeeping & Accounting professional. For a fuller picture of the role itself, see what a bookkeeper does.

What Drives the Cost of Bookkeeping

Whoever does the work, the same factors decide how much of it there is:

• Transaction volume. The number of sales invoices, supplier bills, receipts and bank lines each month is the biggest single driver.
• Complexity. Multiple bank accounts, currencies, entities, stock, or project and departmental tracking all add time.
• Payroll and VAT. Running payroll and preparing VAT returns are often priced as separate services.
• State of the records. Catch-up work on months of unreconciled transactions costs more than keeping current books current.
• Turnaround. Weekly reconciliations and a fast month-end close need more capacity than a quarterly tidy-up.
• Systems. Good cloud accounting software, bank feeds and receipt capture reduce manual effort; paper and spreadsheets increase it.

Regulation is adding to the workload for some businesses. Making Tax Digital for Income Tax (opens in a new tab) applies from 6 April 2026 to sole traders and landlords with qualifying income over £50,000, from 6 April 2027 for qualifying income over £30,000, and from 6 April 2028 for qualifying income over £20,000, according to GOV.UK.

Keeping digital records up to date through the year, rather than once at year-end, is exactly the kind of steady, recurring work a bookkeeper handles.

Option 1: An Accountancy Practice or Bookkeeping Firm

Many small businesses buy bookkeeping as a monthly package from their accountant or a specialist bookkeeping firm. Fees are typically set by transaction bands, with payroll, VAT returns and management accounts priced as extras. Practices publish their own price lists, and because each one bands and bundles differently, compare quotes against your actual monthly volume rather than the starting tier.

The strength of a practice is that bookkeeping sits alongside qualified accountancy and tax advice under one roof. The trade-off is capacity: your work is one client's books among many, turnaround depends on the practice's schedule, and as volume grows the fee rises band by band. Questions such as chasing a supplier, coding an unusual transaction or answering a team member's expense query often still come back to you.

Option 2: An In-House Bookkeeper

Employing a bookkeeper gives you someone inside the business who knows your suppliers, customers and quirks. Pay varies with experience, qualifications, region and hours.

In the ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (2025 provisional, Table 14.7a), median gross annual pay for full-time employees in the occupation group book-keepers, payroll managers and wages clerks (SOC 2020 code 4122) was £31,560, with the middle half of jobs between £26,802 and £40,123. The group also includes payroll managers and wages clerks, so treat it as a guide to bookkeeping pay rather than an exact figure. The figures cover the tax year to 5 April 2025 for full-time employees who had been in the same job for more than a year. They describe UK employee pay, not Remoteli's prices.

On top of pay, employer National Insurance (opens in a new tab) is 15% on earnings above the secondary threshold of £5,000 a year for 2026 to 2027, and auto-enrolment (opens in a new tab) requires an employer pension contribution of at least 3% of qualifying earnings.

Recruitment adds a further cost: the CIPD's Resourcing and talent planning report 2026 (opens in a new tab) puts the median cost per hire for employees below senior management at £2,000, while cautioning that the figure varies widely.

Add equipment, accounting software seats, management time and cover for annual leave, which matters around month-end and VAT deadlines. Our guide to the hidden costs of hiring an employee works through these layers in detail.

Option 3: A Dedicated Remote Bookkeeper

A dedicated remote bookkeeper works full-time on your books, in your accounting software, to your processes, without being on your payroll. It suits businesses whose volume has outgrown a practice package, or who want daily bookkeeping capacity without the cost and administration of an employee.

How Remoteli Pricing Works

Remoteli provides a dedicated, full-time Bookkeeping & Accounting professional. You pay one monthly subscription per professional. Fees exclude VAT and run on a monthly rolling basis with no setup fees. The subscription covers a professional working 180 hours a month, together with recruitment, onboarding and ongoing operational support from Remoteli.

Your price depends on the experience level (Junior, Mid or Senior), the working language, your working hours and the talent market recommended for that combination. If you also need payroll processing support, Payroll & Tax is a separate role with its own price.

What It Does Not Replace

A dedicated bookkeeper keeps your records accurate and up to date. They do not replace your accountant. Your accountant or tax adviser remains responsible for preparing statutory accounts, filing tax returns, acting as your agent with HMRC and giving regulated advice, and any audit remains with your auditor. In practice the two work well together: clean, current books usually mean your accountant spends less time tidying and more time advising.

Professionals are independent contractors who work eight hours a day, five days a week, and take 21 days' annual leave. New standard subscriptions do not include automatic cover during leave, so plan key deadlines around holidays as you would with any team member.

The Three Options Side by Side

The Cost of Doing Nothing

The cheapest bookkeeping option on paper is often the one where the founder does it in the evenings. It rarely stays cheap. Records that fall behind lead to catch-up work, rushed VAT returns, year-end fees that rise because your accountant has to reconstruct the books, and decisions made on cash figures that are weeks out of date.

There is also the opportunity cost. Every hour a founder or operations lead spends reconciling bank lines is an hour not spent on customers, product or sales. When you compare options, include that time at a realistic value, along with the cost of any clean-up work your accountant charges for.

How to Decide

If the answers point to low volume and little day-to-day contact, a practice package is often the sensible choice. If you need full-time capacity in the books and would rather not run recruitment and HR, a dedicated remote bookkeeper is worth pricing alongside a hire. Our guide to what to keep in-house and what to outsource offers a wider framework, and the Finance & Legal Support service page lists all four finance roles.