Monthly Company Expenses
Monthly costs vary based on your needs and company expenses.
Basic Bookkeeping |
Founder Timesaver |
Premium |
|
---|---|---|---|
Price | Starting at $325 per month | Starting at $425 per month | |
QuickBooks Bookkeeping | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Dedicated Account Manager | Bookkeeper | Accountant | Fractional CFO or Controller |
HR Services | No | Available | Available |
State and Local Tax Compliance | No | Yes | Yes |
Corporate Income Tax Returns | Optional | Optional | Optional |
Inventory | No | No | Yes |
Revenue Recognition | Basic Accrual Import | Basic Accrual Import | Advanced Revenue Recognition |
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 US-based 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.
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.
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.
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 under $350 per month, and go up as the company becomes more complicated and expenses grow. See what’s included in our pricing plans!
Basic Bookkeeping |
Founder Timesaver |
Premium |
|
---|---|---|---|
Chart of Accounts | Industry Standard Template | Industry Standard Template | Custom |
Departments and Classes | No | No | Yes |
Consolidations | No | No | Yes |
Financing & Due Diligence Reports | No | No | Yes |
Audit Preparation | No | No | Yes |
Qualitative Trend Analysis & Advice | No | No | Yes |
Multiple Currencies | No | No | Yes |
Reimbursement/check volume | 10 | High | Unlimited |
Supported Accounting Software | QuickBooks Online | QuickBooks Online | QuickBooks Online, Netsuite |
Mandated Systems | Bill.com, Expensify, Track1099 | Bill.com, Expensify, Track1099 | Bill.com, Many Expenses Mgmt Systems |
Required Payroll Provider | Gusto, Rippling, Justworks, Trinet | Gusto, Rippling, Justworks, Trinet | Most |
Pay Period Requirements | 2x a Month | 2x a Month | Unlimited |
Custom Reporting | No | No | Yes |
Supported Banks, Credit Cards | Limited | Limited | Most |
Revenue Collection System | Limited | Limited | Unlimited |
HR Best Practices | No | Yes | Yes |
We will be happy to talk with you about the differences between our pricing plans, 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.
The minimum on-boarding cost for a new client is $750, and there could be additional costs associated with correcting previous months' financials.
What should bookkeeping services cost?
The price of outsourcing your bookkeeping to Kruze starts at under $350 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.
Bookkeeping Price Packages
Kruze offers fixed, monthly bookkeeping price packages that range from ~$350 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.
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 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
As a startup, moving quickly is a top priority for us and we just needed to get our tax return done. After we uploaded our docs, we got our tax return in 3 days! E-filing was confirmed by Day 4. Super responsive and helpful!
Casey McKerchie
VP, Operations of Calm.com
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
I had a great experience working with Kruze Consulting when we raised Series A. They know what VCs need to see, and how to present a startup’s books and finances. If you are going to raise venture capital, you need experts like Kruze.
Chris Mansi
CEO @ Viz.ai
Kruze Consulting is the perfect Accounting, Finance and Tax partner for Los Angeles Startups. Kruze delivers exceptional monthly reporting and financial projections. When we need help with benefits or payroll, Kruze solves our problems. Kruze does our taxes for a fraction of what previous accountants have charged. Thank you Kruze for being a great partner.
Brett O'Brien
CEO @ FLYR
Being a repeat tech entrepreneur, I know how challenging it is to find the ideal CFO - not only is it often expensive to find the right one, but CFOs who combine expertise with scrappiness, market vision and perspective with detail orientation and 'roll up your sleeves' execution is near impossible for an early stage company. So I've been thrilled to work with Kruze Consulting, who not only provide all the ideal characteristics of a top-tier tech CFO, but also live and breathe entrepreneurship themselves. I've known Scott and Vanessa for many years and their deep personal integrity and strong reputation in the industry and made it an easy decision to work with them again.
Tina Fitch
CEO @ HobNob
NIH, NSF, and SBIR grant compliance can add a lot of overhead for a start-up. The Kruze team makes it easy, so we can spend our time growing the business instead of shoveling paperwork.
Charlie Silver
CEO @ Mission Bio
As a startup, it’s incredibly important to keep track of where our money is coming from and where it’s being spent. Kruze Consulting really helps keep our books and taxes in order so that we can focus on the core business. Extremely responsive and very professional, the accountants at Kruze Consulting are a pleasure to work with. We’d highly recommend their services.
Peter Lai
CEO @ Emburse
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
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
Seed | $2,000 |
Seed A | $2,500 |
Seed B | $3,000 |
Seed C | $3,500 |
Contact Us for a Free Consultation