Affordable Startup Bookkeeping and Accounting Packages
Kruze only works with funded startups - we know what it takes to raise that next round, and we’ll help you get there.
"Kruze has saved us a lot of time and tens of thousands of dollars, if you look at the difference between hiring a full-time employee versus a resource like Kruze. If I started another company, one of the first things I’d do is bring in Kruze."
Kruze Sales & Onboarding
Alex Janeck – Vice President of Revenue
Alex Janeck leads all revenue functions at Kruze Consulting, including direct sales, internal expansion, and channel partnerships.
Alex joined Kruze in 2017 as a Senior Consultant, handling accounting, financial planning, and analysis for high-growth venture-backed startups. From there, he moved to lead Sales and Onboarding Operations at Kruze, where he built the customer onboarding practice and developed sales and pricing strategies that helped Kruze grow to annual revenue of over $25 million and oversaw the onboarding for thousands of customers. In addition, Alex has helped to manage and build successful ongoing channel partnership swith VC firms, software providers, banking partners, and other organizations in the startup ecosystem to help leading technology companies.
Before joining Kruze, Alex worked as a consultant providing transaction advisory and M&A services for mid-market companies.
Alex has dual bachelor’s degrees in Corporate Finance and Accounting from Clemson University. He is a fintech enthusiast, an avid backcountry skier, cyclist, cook, and loves to travel.
Why do startup founders like us so much?
It’s not just the low price of our service – it’s the focus on helping funded companies manage their burn and experience navigating VC and M&A due diligence.
And founders love our account management team - with an average of over 10 years of experience, our controllers, CPAs, accountants and bookkeepers understand the challenges of high-growth startups.
What Should Monthly Bookkeeping Cost?
Early-stage companies have surprisingly intense bookkeeping needs, since most are quickly scaling expenses, vendors and often revenue. So it’s not surprising that bookkeeping costs can seem higher than expected. But what should it cost to get the books done?
It depends on who does them!
A founder can do their own books internally; and we generally recommend this until the company has raised at least $250,000 in funding. Cash is too tight to spend on outside services. But as soon as the company has enough funding, the founder should have better things to do than QuickBooks.
The three costs of early-stage bookkeeping
Who you choose to work with can dramatically impact the cost of bookkeeping services - in terms of the actual amount spent, as well as the time spent by the founder PLUS the risk to the business’ next fundraise. There really are three costs of working with a bad bookkeeper.
- This is because bookkeepers who do not have experience working with venture backed startups usually are less efficient to get the job done. And since most accounts bill by the hour, this ends up costing more.
- Secondly, bookkeepers who are unfamiliar with VC backed businesses often end up asking the founder a lot of questions, as they try to figure out where all the company’s cash is coming from (no, the $4 million seed investment is not “bank interest!”)
- Finally, the early stage-companies that we work with expect to go through venture capital due diligence for their next funding round. Your bookkeeper can either make financial diligence a breeze - or can dramatically slow down your deal. We recommend working with someone like Kruze, who knows how to talk to VCs and help get companies funded.
For an early-stage company with low monthly expenses and no revenue, monthly bookkeeping costs should probably be under $1,000 - if not dramatically less. Our plans start at $600 per month, and go up as the company becomes more complicated and expenses grow. See what’s included in our pricing plans!
Which bookkeeping and accounting pricing plan is right for you?
We will be happy to talk with you about the differences between our pricing packages, but recommend you pick the plan that matches your funding levels and the amount of time you want to dedicate to your bookkeeping and regulatory paperwork.
Use the bookkeeping pricing calculator to estimate how much our affordable accounting services will cost your company - simply drag the arrow to your business’ average monthly expenses and the monthly cost will automatically recalculate in the chart. We think our bookkeeping services pricing is among the most competitive in the business, and we aren’t afraid to show it online in our calculator!
We provide set bookkeeping price packages, so that our clients have visibility on their costs. Our recurring bookkeeping services pricing helps founders focus on running their company.
Kruze is 100% focused on working with funded Delaware C-Corps who have raised at least half a million in seed or venture capital financing.
Our goal is to get you due diligence ready, and we charge an onboarding fee to get your financials and books in order. There may be additional costs to correct previous months’ financials.
Do you need a Bookkeeping Services?
How much should a seed stage startup expect to pay for accounting?
How much your seed-funded startup spends on accounting should be a function of 1) your startup’s goals and 2) the ROI on the founder/CEO’s time vs. funding raised.
What Type of a Startup Are You? This Influences the Cost
For 1, your startup’s goals: There are basically two types of seed-funded startups.
a) One type is a small business idea that has raised a bit of funding to get going. Examples might be a local flower shop that has raised some money from friends and family, or a small software company that is only looking to produce a couple of million in revenue a year at scale. That type of a startup should probably work with a local bookkeeper (or do the books in house) and get a fairly priced tax CPA to do an annual tax return. You don’t need accrual based accounting, won’t have stock options, VCs doing board meetings and requesting information, etc. You just need competently produced cash books and a smart tax person who can help you stay compliance but not overpay your taxes. Your bookkeeping costs will hopefully be under a few hundred a month and your tax return might be $1,500 or so.
b) The other type of seed funded startup is a typical “Silicon Valley Style” startup - where you want to raise professional venture funding and dream of eventually going public or getting acquired for hundreds of millions of dollars. These are the types of companies that my firm works with. These companies need accrual based books, have complex capital raises with professional VC due diligence and may even have a demanding board of directors - not all seed companies do, but those that raise $8M or more often do. If you have enough money, you should be paying a professional who knows startups to do your books and taxes. This type of accounting is more expensive, for obvious reasons.
For 2, your founder/CEO’s time ROI: There is a constant tradeoff between a startup’s burn rate and the amount of time the CEO spends on menial tasks. Once a company has raised enough money, it makes a lot of sense for the CEO to focus on the tasks that really help the company hit its growth goals, like achieving product market fit, hiring the best talent and raising the next VC round. I’d say this split probably happens when a startup has raised around $500,000 in seed funding. Less than that, the founder should probably just do the books to save the burn. More than that, the startup has raised enough money where letting the founder focus on achieving business objectives trumps the slight increase in burn from having a professional CPA do the work. The cost of the founder not focusing on the business is too great; it’s time to outsource.
Seed Stage Accounting Cost Estimates
| Traditional SMB | Silicon Valley Style Startup |
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<$500k in funding:
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<$500k in funding:
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>$500k in funding:
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>$500k in funding:
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Since Kruze Consulting has done the books and taxes for hundreds of venture and seed funded startups (the Silicon Valley Style ones, not the SMB ones), the following factors will contribute to how much your bookkeeping costs:
- The volume of your transactions: do you have 300 transactions hitting your bank account and credit cards every month, or 10,000 transactions? More transactions = more time = more money.
- The complexity of your transactions: even if you have relatively few transactions, they may be complex. For example, you may have prepaid Facebook $100,000 for advertising for the next year. You or your bookkeeper will then need to reconcile that account every month against what advertising amount you’ve actually used.
- Doing the work yourself: if you can train yourself to do some of the bookkeeping, you can definitely save money. Two caveats though, 1) your time is truly better spent growing and managing your startup and 2) if you get it wrong it will very likely be expensive to clean up the books.
- How you’ve leveraged technology: I can’t stress this enough… using technology will greatly reduce the amount of time (aka money) you have to spend on Accounting and HR. Here are my absolute essentials: QuickBooks, Gusto/Rippling/Justworks, Brex or Ramp, a quality startup focused bank. Set those up and you’ll be in good shape for doing it yourself, until it’s the time to flip to outsourcing so you can focus on driving the business forward.
In sum, what you spend on Accounting & HR for your startup depends on your unique situation. But just to give you an idea… If you are a Seed Stage DE CCorp startup based in SF, NYC, or Chicago, have 10 FTEs, ~400 transactions a month and no accruals… I’d say ~$500 per month to ~$750 per month.
We’ve got a little monthly startup bookkeeping pricing estimator on our website - click here to see startup bookkeeping prices. And if you want to estimate your startup’s tax return costs, use our tax return estimator here.
What should a Seed Stage company look for in an accountant?
Seed stage founders don’t have time to coordinate accounting matters - so look for an accountant who is full service, who can:
- Do your monthly bookkeeping for an attractive price
- Handle ongoing compliance work like franchise taxes
- Produce your federal and state tax returns
- Find startup tax creditsthan can reduce your burn rate
We recommend ONE accounting firm to handle all of this for your seed-stage company. That way you avoid tedious coordination between your bookkeeper and tax accountant. Plus, since many of the tax credits flow through your payroll processor, you want your monthly bookkeeper to be away of the incoming credits and to take action if there is a mistake (we see this happen about once a year or so, usually to the tune of $15,000 to $20,000 missing - a big deal if you’ve only raised a few hundred thousand dollars in funding!).
At the risk of sounding like a commercial for my own services, I really want to emphasize that if you are a seed funded startup that wants to raise traditional venture capital, work with a CPA who has a lot of successful startup clients. Venture Capital due diligence is a pain. Don’t risk slowing down your fund raise because your books weren’t done professionally (and in the style that experienced VCs want to see).
The price of outsourcing your bookkeeping
What should bookkeeping services cost?
The price of outsourcing your bookkeeping to Kruze starts at $600 per month for an early-stage startup, and can range up to $3,000+ for divisions of public companies or startups that have hundreds of employees. The cost is dependent on the number of transactions and complexity of your bookkeeping. Unlike many of our competitors, our accounting team will customize your package to meet your bookkeeping and tax compliance needs.
What’s included in our bookkeeping services?
Bookkeeping Price Packages
Kruze offers fixed, monthly bookkeeping price packages that range from ~$600 per month to several thousand dollars per month, depending on the complexity of your books and the number of transactions. We believe that startups deserve to know what their monthly bookkeeping costs will be, which is why we offer set, recurring packages. The highest end of these packages are suitable for divisions of public companies, startups with multiple locations with complex compliance needs and more.
Bookkeeping Services Pricing - How are they calculated?
It’s normal for startup founders to want to understand how their startup’s bookkeeping services are priced. And it’s a really good question because there are several variables that make startup accounting more or less expensive.
The two components to bookkeeping services pricing
The two fundamental components to how much getting your books done costs are transaction volume and dollar amount spent. Transaction volume is just simply how many transactions does your company have every month? And at this point in the analysis we are not really worrying about whether they’re like easy transactions like Uber, or more complex expenses like international wires or contractor payments that span many months. The second component is dollars spent. This is a quick kind of shortcut to see how much is the company actually spending every month. This correlates very nicely with transaction volume. But, if used in conjunction with the number of transactions, it shows where there might be outliers that would impact the effort to close the books, and thus impact the cost to deliver bookkeeping services. More complex, bigger dollar amount transactions can lead to more complicated accounting work - at least for providers that are providing accrual based financials (which is important for VC-backed startups).
Why GAAP financials cost more
There are a number of startup bookkeeping providers who claim to do “automated” bookkeeping or automated accounting. In our opinion, what we seem to be noticing, from their upset clients who then come to us, is that these automated vendors don’t really seem to be able to reliably produce GAAP-based, accrual financial statements. Deferred revenue, customer prepays, fixed asset schedules, upfront payments for SaaS software - these are items that need to be split out to make correct accrual accounting. Now, this is also where it gets kind of fun, because if you’re using good systems you can actually save a lot of money.
How the right financial systems can reduce the cost of bookkeeping
When our startup clients are using great credit card systems like Brex, and Ramp and Airbase, and very good startup banks like SVB, or First Republic, Mercury, Bridge Bank, Comerica, great payroll like Rippling, Gusto, Justworks, TriNet, it actually can help automate some of those transactions for us. A lot of those systems actually have built in either integrations or ways for us to handle them automatically, so that gets some of the work off the accountant’s plate. This means that many transactions can be automatically and cleanly dropped into QuickBooks, it’s actually coming in cleanly into QuickBooks. Now, the accountant still has to validate and make sure it’s accurate, but it saves quite a bit of effort.
How Kruze’s automated accounting system creates efficiency
At Kruze, we’ve built our own, in-house automation called Kruze Keeper, which automatically recognizes the text from the bank feed for most transactions, about 75% of the transactions. Kruze Keeper can automatically get those transactions into QuickBooks without an accountant having to touch it. This helps us keep the cost of delivering bookkeeping services down.
Client communication matters - why low-cost, fully automated systems aren’t great for startup founders
The Kruze team also makes time for client communications and monthly Zoom calls for clients in our premium pricing tiers who want to connect on their financials. We actually want to talk to our clients (although we also understand if they are too busy to to talk - building a startup is a lot of work!). With millions of venture capital dollars at stake, we do find that most of our clients DO want to talk with our team on a regular basis. So, doing a recurring call, making sure we are keeping up with questions, is really powerful. The higher priced bookkeeping packages provide time for the founder to connect with the accounting team.
Recurring tax compliance costs
Kruze’s in-house tax team handles our clients’ tax compliance work. Our team can help you understand which tax filings are included in the recurring monthly costs and which are an additional fee - but a major advantage of working with a CPA like Kruze is that all of your recurring compliance issues, which often rely on bookkeeping data, can be done by the same team. This saves founders time! Most bookkeeping firms or accounting firms don’t offer tax services, or if they do, they outsource it. This not only leads to additional costs, it also can result in mistakes. And for Kruze’s clients, having the same team assist on the financial statements due diligence as helps on the tax diligence can reduce the headache of the VC diligence process.
How can Kruze Offer Such Low Cost Bookkeeping Plans?
It’s actually a lot harder than it looks! But our ability to offer high quality bookkeeping services at such a low price is due to a combination of our focus, experience and technology.
Because we only work with early-stage, funded companies, we’ve developed deep expertise and detailed, battle-tested processes specific to the needs of our clients. Secondly, our team is highly experienced - our account managers have an average of 11 year of experience, which means they don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time a client has a need. Someone in Kruze has probably seen it and done it, which saves us time and lowers our costs. Finally, we’ve built in-house software to help us generate our clients’ books and financial reports. We combine that proprietary technology with best-in-class, off-the-shelf software like QuickBooks, Expensify and others to deliver high quality, and affordable, services.
We offer high quality bookkeeping services
How to save money on bookkeeping
The good news is that using the right fintech and accounting systems can save a startup money on bookkeeping by automating the flow of data and automatically categorizing transactions according to GAAP.
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Choose accounting software
Choose the right accounting software - QuickBooks Online is a great choice if you want to reduce the cost of bookkeeping because it can be linked to many bank accounts, credit cards, payroll providers, etc., meaning that many transactions can be automatically pulled into the accounting software and easily categorized.
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Pick a credit card
Pick a credit card that is right for startups - Brex, Ramp, Airbase can all help make monthly bookkeeping easier by easily putting data into QuickBooks Online. Another tip is to not use multiple cards - work with one provider to reduce your monthly accounting effort.
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Choose the right bank
Work with the right bank - some banks work smoothly with QBO. FRB, SVB, Mercury all have stable systems that make monthly accounting faster, and make bank reconciliations easier.
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Choose payroll provider
Choose automated payroll providers - Rippling, Gusto, Justworks - the best payroll systems don’t require monthly babysitting from your accountant, which helps make your monthly bookkeeping faster and cheaper. Plus, they auto-categorize many transactions, which means less time is spent clicking a mouse in QuickBooks.
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Find a CPA
Work with a tech-forward CPA - Kruze’s accounting team uses our in-house automation software, that can categorize many of the transactions startups typically see - without manual intervention needed by expensive accountants, reducing the cost of monthly bookkeeping.
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Held effective communication
Respond to your accountants questions - help keep your monthly bookkeeping costs down by responding promptly to your accountants questions.
Client testimonials
We're huge fans of Vanessa and the folks at Kruze Consulting. They set up our books, finances, and other operations, and are constantly organized and on top of things. As a startup, you have to focus on your product and customers, and Kruze takes care of everything else (which is a massive sigh of relief). I highly highly highly recommend working with Vanessa and her team.
Vivek Sodera
Co-Founder @ Superhuman
Prior to Kruze, as a remote-first team, we were weighed down by a lot of the bureaucracy involved with having a distributed workforce. Kruze has supported us above and beyond basic accounting needs by ensuring we have everything we need to expand and support our team wherever they may be located
Zack Fisch
Pequity's Head of Operations & Legal
Avochato has been growing rapidly in the past year – in fact, too quickly for us to keep up with books, taxes, and budgeting for growth. Partnering with Kruze Consulting has been fantastic to manage, track, and analyze our finances while we continue focusing on building our customer base. Kruze’s team knows what startups need.
Alex De Simone
CEO @ Avochato
Everybody, go to Kruze Consulting. They do a great job. I personally can tell you, they've done a great job for our companies, including Calm.com. I'm sure they’ll do a great job for you.
Jason Calacanis
Angel investor
Consulting, Tax and Valuation Prices
Competitively priced for high-growth companies
Financial Consulting
| Staff Accountant | $120 |
| Senior Staff Accountant | $170 |
| Controller | $200 |
| Senior Controller | $250 |
| Financial Modeling | $400 |
| CFO / COO / VP | $400 |
Tax Advice
| Administrative | $115 |
| Tax Analyst | $175 |
| Senior Tax Analyst | $295 |
| Tax Manager | $395 |
| Tax VP | $495 |
| CEO | $495 |
Startup 409A Valuation
| Pre-Seed/Seed | $2,000 |
| Seed A | $2,500 |
| Seed B | $3,000 |
| Seed C | $3,500 |
R&D Tax Credit
Estimation Tool
Save on payroll taxes this year
We charge a fixed fee of 1.5% of qualified research expenses with a minimum fee of $1,500. Our clients claimed over $47 million in federal R&D credits last year!