What it costs
What bookkeeping actually costs, and what moves the number
We are not going to print a price, because a price that ignores your transaction volume would be a marketing number rather than a real one. What we will do is name every variable that moves it.
Precisebooks
Search for what bookkeeping costs in Dubai and you will find almost nothing useful. Every firm in this market, ours included, quotes on the specifics. That is defensible, because the specifics genuinely change the number by a large multiple. What is not defensible is refusing to say what the specifics are.
So here they are.
What moves a monthly bookkeeping fee
**Transaction volume.** The single biggest driver. A business with forty transactions a month and one with four thousand are not the same job, and no sensible fee treats them as one.
**Number of bank accounts.** Each account is its own reconciliation. Multi currency accounts count for more, because every one carries a revaluation question at period end.
**Whether you are VAT registered.** Registration adds a return cycle, tax coding on every transaction and a record keeping standard that has to hold up to inspection.
**Number of entities.** Two companies is more than twice one company if there are transactions between them, because those have to reconcile against each other as well as against the bank.
**The state of what you are handing over.** This is the one people do not expect. Clean records handed over in a system we can read cost less to take on than a year of loose documents. Backlog should be quoted once, separately, rather than absorbed into a monthly figure that then stays inflated forever.
What should not move it
A monthly bookkeeping fee should not vary with your revenue. You are buying a volume of work, not a percentage of your business, and a fee that scales with your turnover is charging you for growing rather than for anything it costs to deliver.
How to read a quote
Ask what happens when volume changes. Ask whether backlog is separate. Ask what the fee includes at year end, because "bookkeeping" that stops short of anything an auditor can use is a smaller job than it sounds. And ask what happens if the records turn out to be worse than they looked, because the honest answer is a re quote and the dishonest answer is silence followed by an invoice.
If a firm will not tell you which variables move their number, that is information too.
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