Bookkeeping pricing calculator: turn a client’s transactions, payroll and GST into hours, then a monthly fee.
Enter the client’s monthly transactions, accounts, employees, pay runs and GST frequency, and your own minutes per task and hourly rate. It works out the hours a month and a rounded fixed fee, excl and incl GST, with the fee per transaction and the effective hourly rate after rounding. Runs on the page; the Excel download prices three packages side by side. Free, no email required.
How do you price bookkeeping services in NZ?
Price from hours, not from what the last client paid. Count what drives the time: bank transactions a month (coding, matching, the odd query), accounts to reconcile, pay runs and the employees on each, GST returns a year, debtor chasing and the monthly report. Multiply each by your real minutes per task from a month you tracked, add a share for queries and email, and you have the hours. Multiply by the rate your hour has to earn (wage, overheads and profit divided by billable hours), round up, and that is the fixed fee. Write the limits down (transactions, employees, accounts) and what happens when a client outgrows them. In 6,190 positive publicly posted reviews of NZ accounting and bookkeeping practices, value for fees is praised in only 7.0%, tenth of eleven traits, while proactive advice is praised in 42.2%. Clients do not thank you for being cheap. They remember a fee that changed without warning.
Hours first. The fee follows.
Your numbers
The client
Your time and rate
What it works out to
Runs in your browser; nothing you type is stored or sent anywhere. The Excel download carries the same formulas, so the two always agree.
The job this document is doing.
- —The fee was set at $250 a month because that sounded fair; the client turned out to have 400 transactions and a weekly payroll
- —Hours were never tracked, so the practice could not tell which clients were paying less than minimum wage for the time
- —The fee went up after a year with no limits written down, and the client read it as a rate hike rather than a bigger job
- —Three packages were advertised with no transaction caps, so every client bought the cheapest one
Open it and use it today.
- 01Client drivers: transactions, accounts, employees, pay frequency, GST frequency, debtor hours, reporting hours
- 02Your time: minutes per transaction, per reconciliation, per pay run (plus per employee), hours per GST return, an admin share, your hourly rate and the rounding step
- 03Hours a month by task and in total, the monthly fee excl and incl GST, a year’s value, fee per transaction and effective hourly rate
- 04Excel workbook: the same formulas across Starter, Standard and Plus columns so a package ladder comes from one set of time assumptions, plus a how-to sheet
- 05Nothing you type is sent anywhere; the calculator runs in your browser
Free to use and adapt for your own practice. The time assumptions are starting points; replace them with a month you actually tracked.
Why this document, and not another one.
| Measure (NZ accounting and bookkeeping) | Figure | Rank among 11 praised traits |
|---|---|---|
| Value for fees praised, positive reviews | 7.0% | 10th |
| Proactive advice praised, positive reviews | 42.2% | 4th |
| Overcharging or fees mentioned, negative reviews | About 2% |
From 7,571 publicly posted customer reviews of 484 NZ accounting and bookkeeping practices, collected October 2026. Each review carries a single star rating: 4 or 5 stars counted as positive (n=6,190), 2 stars or fewer as negative (n=328, reported as rank order rather than precision, so negative-review figures are rounded). Praise and complaint traits were coded against a fixed taxonomy; no business is named. Full corpus, method and thresholds: the accounting & bookkeeping methodology page. Full findings: the accounting & bookkeeping research study.
Use it alongside
Bookkeeping pricing and fee proposal template
A two-page proposal: what you understand about the client’s business, the scope line by line, three packages side by side, one-off set-up, exclusions, how fees change, payment terms and acceptance.
Open this resource →A template fixes one document. The diagnostic finds the rest.
Seven minutes, results immediately: five pillars scored, your leaks quantified in dollars.
Start Diagnostic — $249