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.
