How Much Does a Bookkeeper for Landlords Cost?

How is landlord bookkeeping priced?

Four models, and knowing which one you are being quoted tells you more than the number does.

• Hourly. Common with independent bookkeepers. Honest in the sense that you pay for time spent, and unpredictable in the sense that a messy month costs more than a clean one, which is the opposite of what you want when a month is already messy. Hard to budget against.
• Flat monthly by transaction volume. A fixed fee, banded by how many transactions your books carry in a typical month. Predictable, and it tracks the actual work more closely than the alternatives.
• Flat monthly by property count. Simple to quote and frequently wrong, because doors do not create bookkeeping. Two portfolios with the same door count can differ by several times in the transactions they generate.
• Per transaction. Sometimes used for narrowly scoped work such as a reclassification project. Precise for a defined job, awkward as an ongoing arrangement, since it prices the count without pricing the reconciliation, the reporting, or the judgment.

Catch-up work on a backlog is priced separately from ongoing service under every one of these models, usually per month of backlog. We cover what moves that number in what catch-up bookkeeping costs.

Why does transaction volume beat property count?

Because the work is the transactions, and rental activity per door varies enormously.

A long-term single-family rental in a stable year produces something like a rent deposit, a mortgage payment, an insurance bill, a tax bill, and a handful of repairs. A short-term rental of the same house produces booking payouts several times a month, each bundling gross rent, platform service fees, cleaning income, and guest-collected lodging tax that has to be held as a liability rather than booked as revenue, plus cleaning invoices, supply runs, and utility bills the owner now pays directly. Same door. Several times the bookkeeping.

“Doors do not create bookkeeping. Activity does. A price quoted off a property count is a price quoted off the wrong number.”

That is why our pricing page sets the tier by transaction volume and shows property ranges only as a rough reference point. It is also why any quote you receive should come after someone has looked at your actual monthly activity rather than after you named a number of properties.

What should be included at any price?

Compare inclusions before comparing numbers. A low monthly fee that stops at categorization is not cheaper, it is less. A baseline worth insisting on:

• Monthly reconciliation to statements for every bank and card account. This is the step that makes the numbers verifiable rather than merely tidy, and it is the most common thing missing from a cheap quote.
• Categorization with a property tag on every transaction, so per-property reporting is a filter rather than a project. See getting a P&L per property.
• Correct handling of the entries that are actually hard: mortgage payments split into principal, interest, and escrow; security deposits held as liabilities; capital improvements recorded as assets rather than repairs; platform payouts broken into their components.
• A profit and loss and a balance sheet every month, per entity. The balance sheet is the one most often quietly omitted.
• A CPA-ready year-end package. What that should contain is covered in what your CPA actually needs at year end.
• Ownership of your own file. The subscription should be in your name, so your history is yours regardless of who does the work.

Two things are normally outside a bookkeeping fee: your software subscription, which you hold yourself, and tax return preparation, which is your CPA’s work.

What does Real Cents Organized charge?

Monthly plans run across seven tiers set by transaction volume, from $124.95 per month at the entry tier to $569.95 per month at the top published tier, with custom pricing above that. Setup is a one-time $44.95 per property to build the chart of accounts and configure the file correctly from the start. A 30-minute consultation, for a second opinion or a review of books you keep yourself, is $75. Current figures for every tier are on the pricing page, which is the authoritative source if anything here has moved.

The tier is set after looking at your actual transaction volume, not from a property count on an intake form, and the scoping call is free and takes about twenty minutes. If you are still deciding whether to hire at all, the honest case for doing it yourself is worth reading first; for a small single-entity long-term portfolio it is frequently the better answer.

The Bottom Line

Ask which pricing model you are being quoted, insist that monthly reconciliation and a balance sheet are inside the fee, confirm the software subscription will be in your name, and treat any price given off a property count as provisional. Real Cents Organized publishes seven monthly tiers from $124.95 to $569.95 by transaction volume, $44.95 one-time setup per property, and $75 for a 30-minute consultation, with the tier set after a look at your real activity.

Frequently asked questions

Why do bookkeepers price by transaction volume instead of by property?

Because transactions are the work. A long-term rental might generate under ten entries a month while a short-term rental generates several times that, since each booking payout bundles gross rent, platform fees, cleaning income, and collected lodging tax that all have to be separated. Pricing by door count charges the simple portfolio too much and the busy one too little.

Does a bookkeeping fee include my QuickBooks or Stessa subscription?

Usually not, and at Real Cents Organized it does not. Clients hold their own active subscription so the file, and all of its history, stays in their name. That is what makes changing bookkeepers an administrative step rather than a rebuild, and it means you always have direct access to your own financial records.

What is the cheapest legitimate option for a landlord?

For one or two long-term rentals with low activity, a bookkeeping platform plus your own monthly discipline is genuinely the cheapest legitimate option, and it works. The next step up is a one-time professional setup or a periodic paid review rather than a full monthly service. Full service earns its cost once volume, entities, or short-term rental payouts are involved.