If you have fallen behind on your books and want to get caught up, Bench might be the best option for you. If you’re using QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Live can match you with a ProAdvisor to help you manage your books. If you need other services aside from bookkeeping, such as financial planning and tax advice, you should consider 1-800Accountant. There are many factors to consider, such as if they can handle the accounting tasks you want to outsource and offer the services you need—at present and in the future—at a cost you can afford.

Types of virtual bookkeepers

Online bookkeeping services typically offer a dedicated contact or team — but these are still virtual bookkeepers, available by email or occasionally by phone. If you don’t want to communicate virtually, these bookkeeper interview questions can help you find a resource near you. Lots of bookkeeping services are built to run on QuickBooks, an industry leader in accounting and bookkeeping software. Some services also support Xero, another popular cloud-based accounting software. If you’re comfortable with your current software, ensure your bookkeeping service supports it.

How to choose bookkeeping services

Additionally, you’ll have access to bookkeepers, tax and financial advisors, payroll specialists, and a dedicated accountant who is an expert in your state and industry. In the area of tax and consulting, its Premium plan will file your annual tax return and provide tax advisory services. However, it doesn’t offer sales tax return filing and chief financial officer (CFO) advice. Freelancers and startups that work remotely will often appreciate the iOS mobile app that provides financial reporting functionality and real-time cash flow updates. Upon enrollment, you’ll have access to a team of in-house bookkeepers, and you can book a monthly check-in or tax season review call with them at no additional charge. It means that your virtual bookkeeping service has missed the biggest boat of all when it comes to being a “cloud-based” bookkeeping service.

Virtual accounting FAQ

With Live Expert Full-Service Bookkeeping, your dedicated bookkeeper will work with you to get to know your business, bring your past books up to date, and manage your bookkeeping for you, start to finish. Because bookkeeping is going to cost you no matter how you take care of it. Once you do the math, you’ll get an idea of how much you really spend on https://www.intuit-payroll.org/ bookkeeping every month—even if you’re not cutting yourself a check for those services. If you’re a freelancer, try applying your hourly rate to the time you spend on bookkeeping. 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.

1. If your prospective virtual bookkeeping service understands the value of adding to the conversation, then it is a good sign that they will be genuinely helpful to your business.
2. Ignite Spot Accounting is best for businesses that want bookkeepers who are certified in popular bookkeeping programs.
3. 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.
4. If you have employees or contractors, try applying the hourly rate of the one whose time costs the most.
5. Depending on the bookkeeping service, costs also rise when your business’s monthly expenses exceed a particular threshold.

In contrast, outsourced bookkeeping and accounting nearly always refers to accountants with an accounting firm who handle your books from their own office. It also starts at $190 a month, which is less than nearly every other provider on our list. You should outsource your bookkeeping tasks to a virtual bookkeeper if you don’t have the time for and knowledge of DIY bookkeeping. As your business grows and your financial transactions increase, you will need a virtual bookkeeper to do routine tasks, like classifying transactions and reconciling bank accounts. As your business grows and potentially takes on funding, the accrual-based and advanced bookkeeping services that it offers will be especially useful.

You should be able to access a dedicated bookkeeper for any questions or advice and one-on-one assistance. Because each plan depends on many factors, we looked at the value provided in terms of the time and potential money that you’re saving by using the service. Botkeeper is best for accounting https://www.personal-accounting.org/checkeeper/ firms that want to scale by automating bookkeeping tasks. The benefit of using a virtual bookkeeper as a business owner is that it is often cheaper than hiring someone local to work on-site. The bookkeeper can be paid as a contractor and work as little or as much as the business needs.

However, with hundreds of options, it can be daunting to sort through them all and find the best service for your business. We’ve analyzed the best bookkeeping services to help you find the right solution quickly and easily. Forbes Advisor selected these services based on their service options, pricing, customer service, reputation and more. 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.

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. Pilot’s pricing is the most expensive of the online bookkeeping services that we reviewed in this guide, which is why it earned a low score in this category. It is also lacking in customer support, as you can only contact your dedicated bookkeeper via email or the QuickBooks portal. If you’re seeking a low-cost service that also offers strong customer support, QuickBooks Live is an excellent option. QuickBooks Live is an online bookkeeping service offered by QuickBooks Online, which we ranked as the best small business accounting software. Our overall best online bookkeeping service is Bench because it provides bookkeeping support at a lower cost than many similar platforms while also offering tax assistance and payroll integration.

Add-ons for job costing and project-based accounting may be especially useful for project-based businesses. Other add-ons include inventory management, payroll and 1099 support. While Equivity offers a fairly robust bookkeeping package, they don’t use their own software. If you sign up for Equivity, your virtual bookkeeper will use QuickBooks, or another off-the-shelf accounting app, to manage your bookkeeping for you. You’ll need to learn how to use this software in order to help categorize transactions or enter transactions manually. And, out of all virtual bookkeeping services, Bench is the highest rated by users.

If you want all of these features—including bill pay, invoicing, full-service payroll, customized services, and tax and consulting services—Bookkeeper360 is an excellent solution. While it doesn’t offer many of the advanced tools that other online bookkeeping services provide, it’s easy to use and has a quick setup process. Forbes Advisor analyzed 13 online insurance expense definition bookkeeping services and considered 15 metrics such as price, features, customer service, ease of use, integrations and service level. We also looked at real customer experiences to determine if their expectations were met based on what each company promised. After assigning a weighted score to each category, we formulated rankings for each company.

It can also file your income tax return and provide both tax and CFO advice, but sales tax return filing is unavailable. At the very least, you can expect most bookkeeping services to input transactions, reconcile accounts and send you financial statements regularly. Most services touch base monthly, but in some cases, you can pay extra to receive weekly reports.

If you don’t have an accountant, you can opt to add tax filing to your subscription, and let Bench take care of taxes for you. At Bench, for example, we connect directly to your bank and credit card accounts to automatically pull your transactions. Then we categorize every transaction and produce shiny financial statements for you. We also give you an easy-to-use platform with simple reports and dashboards to keep track of your finances.

His services include basic bookkeeping and CFO-level services such as financial modeling. Customize plans to include other services like accounts receivable processing, inventory reconciliation and payroll support. As passionate as she is about numbers, she is just as passionate about people and providing excellent service with an upbeat, positive attitude.