A bookkeeper records what happened in your business, an accountant explains what it means and files on it, and a CPA is an accountant holding a state license that lets them issue an opinion on financial statements and represent you before the IRS without limits. Most owners running $500K to $2M in revenue need a bookkeeper every month and an accountant or a CPA once or twice a year, in that order, because everything the accountant does sits on top of the ledger the bookkeeper builds. Budget roughly $200 to $900 a month for bookkeeping and $800 to $2,000 for a business tax return.
The three titles get sold interchangeably, which is how an owner ends up paying a CPA $250 an hour to sort out fourteen months of uncategorized card charges, and then paying again in April when the return has to be rebuilt on top of the corrected numbers. The work splits cleanly once you look at what each person is actually holding, and the split is what tells you who to call first.
What does a bookkeeper actually do?
A bookkeeper owns the record of money in and money out. That means coding every transaction to the right account, matching the bank and card feeds to the ledger so the balance in your books equals the balance at the bank, entering the bills you owe and the invoices you have sent, following up on the customers who are late, keeping receipts attached to the charges they belong to, and posting payroll so wages, withholding and the employer share all land where they should. Done well it is a maintenance job with a weekly rhythm, and done badly it turns into a four-week archaeology project every spring.
An in-house bookkeeper costs about $49,210 a year at the national median for bookkeeping, accounting and auditing clerks according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and that is base pay before employer payroll taxes, benefits, software and the hours you spend supervising, which in practice puts a full-time hire nearer $62,000 to $70,000 loaded. A freelancer bills $25 to $60 an hour depending on the market and usually works 8 to 20 hours a month for a business your size, and an outsourced service quotes monthly, generally $200 to $900 at $500K to $2M of revenue, moving past $1,000 once inventory, a second entity or a few hundred transactions a month enter the picture.
What does an accountant do that a bookkeeper does not?
An accountant takes the finished ledger and turns it into something you can decide from. They build the chart of accounts so it maps to how you actually run, they post the entries a bank feed can never see on its own like depreciation, insurance prepaid across twelve months, wages accrued between the last pay period and the year end, and owner draws that should have gone through payroll, and then they read the statements back to you and say what changed and why. At filing time they prepare the return, choose the elections, and answer the questions about entity structure, timing and equipment purchases that only make sense with a full year in view. Rates run $150 to $400 an hour, and plenty of very good accountants hold no CPA license at all.
What is a CPA licensed to do?
A CPA has passed a national exam, met a state's education requirement, logged supervised experience, and keeps the license current with continuing education every year. That license carries an authority nobody else has, which is the ability to issue an audit or a review opinion on your financial statements, and it carries unlimited rights to represent you in front of the IRS. Enrolled agents and tax attorneys hold those same unlimited representation rights, and an enrolled agent is licensed by the IRS specifically for tax work, so if what you need is a return prepared and an examination letter answered rather than an attest opinion for a lender or a buyer, an enrolled agent covers it at a lower rate.
How much does each role cost in 2026?
Prices move with transaction volume and with geography, and the ranges below are what owner-led businesses in the $500K to $2M band are being quoted this year.
| Who | What they own | What it costs | How often you use them |
|---|---|---|---|
| You plus accounting software | Coding, reconciling, invoicing, chasing money in | $30 to $120 a month for software, plus 5 to 12 hours of your time | Weekly, forever |
| Freelance bookkeeper | Coding and reconciling, sometimes billing | $25 to $60 an hour, often 8 to 20 hours a month | Monthly |
| Outsourced bookkeeping service | The whole ledger plus a monthly close | $200 to $900 a month at your revenue | Daily or monthly |
| In-house bookkeeper | The ledger, billing, collections, payroll entry | $49,210 median base, roughly $62,000 to $70,000 loaded | Full time |
| Accountant or enrolled agent | Statements, adjusting entries, the tax return | $150 to $400 an hour, $800 to $2,000 for a business return | Quarterly and at filing |
| CPA firm | All of the above plus audits, reviews and IRS representation | $200 to $450 an hour | Annually, or when something goes wrong |
| Fractional CFO | Forecasting, pricing, cash planning, lender conversations | $2,000 to $10,000 a month | Monthly, usually in a specific stretch |
Which one does a business at $500K to $2M need?
Both, and the bookkeeping is the piece that cannot slip. At $500K you are generating somewhere between 150 and 400 transactions a month across a bank account, a card, a payment processor and payroll, and every one of them has to land in the right account before any statement means anything at all. The accountant work is real, and it is seasonal and bounded, maybe eight to twenty hours across the year for a business this size unless you are restructuring, buying something large or selling. So the recurring money goes where the volume is, which is the monthly record, and the annual work gets bought as a service rather than carried as a seat.
The exception is the owner who is already behind. If you have not reconciled since last March and the feed is carrying a year of uncoded charges, putting a monthly bookkeeper on top of that means paying them to work around a mess every single month, so the cleaner sequence is a one-time catch-up of the back months and then a monthly cadence running on books that are already right. The same logic applies if you are moving from cash to accrual, because the conversion is a project with an end date and the maintenance is not.
What order should you hire them in?
- Get the monthly bookkeeping running first, because a return, a loan application and a valuation are all just readings taken off the ledger, and a wrong ledger makes all three wrong at once.
- Add a return preparer once the books close on time, and give them a clean trial balance in January rather than a shoebox in March, which is where most of the fee difference between a $900 return and a $2,500 return comes from.
- Bring in advisory when a decision is actually pending, meaning a hire you are not sure you can carry, a lease, an equipment purchase, a partner buyout or a sale, and pay for it by the project instead of on retainer until the questions become constant.
What will a CPA not do for you?
A CPA will not chase the $340 hardware store charge nobody coded, and if you ask them to you will get it back as a line on an invoice at $200 an hour, or as a staff person's time billed at $90. They are not in your books in February, so they cannot tell you that your gross margin slipped four points in January, and they will not call the customer who is 60 days past due or notice that card processing quietly moved from 2.6% to 3.1% over the spring. A CPA who sees you once a year is doing careful work on a year that has already finished, which is exactly what you want for the filing and no help at all for the decision you made in June.
They also will not, in most firms, run your payroll, register you for sales tax in the four states you now have nexus in, or reconcile your merchant deposits against your sales. Some firms sell those as separate services with a separate team and a separate bill, which is worth asking about directly, because the assumption that your CPA is watching the month is the single most common way owners end up with fourteen months of drift and a surprise bill for outsourced accounting to fix it.
Where does Median fit?
We run the bookkeeping layer. Software codes and posts your transactions every business day, an accountant on our side reviews the exceptions and the entries that need judgment, and your ledger stays current through yesterday instead of through last quarter, which is the whole point of bookkeeping built for owner-led businesses. We are not a CPA firm, so when a lender wants an audit or a review opinion we will say so and point you to one. Tax filing is a separate add-on rather than something folded into the monthly fee, and we take on returns for businesses whose books we already keep, which is set out on our tax services page, with the full rate card on our pricing page.
The decision most owners at this size get wrong is treating the annual return as the accounting relationship and the monthly record as an errand to squeeze in on a Sunday. Flip those two, and the return gets cheaper, faster and far less argumentative, because the person preparing it is reading a ledger that was right all year.