Most Melbourne businesses pay between $300 and $2,500 a month for ongoing bookkeeping, or $60 to $110 an hour if they’re billed by time. The range is wide because the work is. A bookkeeper handling 40 transactions and a quarterly BAS for a sole trader is doing a different job from one running fortnightly payroll for a café with eight staff on three different awards.
So the hourly rate tells you almost nothing on its own. What you actually pay comes down to how many transactions you generate, whether payroll is in the mix, how often your BAS goes in, and what state your books are in when someone takes them over.
This guide covers what Melbourne businesses are paying in 2026, what moves the number up or down, and the charges that tend to land after you’ve already signed.
What Drives Bookkeeping Costs in Melbourne
When you ask how much a bookkeeper costs, the honest answer is that you’re paying for three things at once: the hours, the compliance risk someone is carrying on your behalf, and the complexity of your particular setup. Here’s how each one shows up in the price.
Transaction volume
This is the lever that moves your bill more than anything else. Every sale, supplier payment, expense and pay run has to be coded and reconciled against your bank feed. Fifty transactions a month is a couple of hours’ work. Five hundred is most of a week. The bookkeeping rates you’re quoted will track that volume more closely than any other factor.
Payroll
Two salaried staff barely register. Fifteen casuals across mixed Modern Awards, with penalty rates and leave accruals to track, is where the hours climb, because award interpretation under the Fair Work Act and STP Phase 2 reporting both sit on the bookkeeper. Payroll mistakes get expensive fast, and that exposure is priced into the fee whether it’s itemised or not.
BAS frequency
Quarterly is standard. If you lodge monthly, you’re buying twelve touchpoints a year instead of four, and the bookkeeping fees move accordingly. Worth knowing: anyone lodging your BAS has to be a registered BAS agent under the Tax Agent Services Act, and that registration is part of what you’re paying for.
The state of your books
Walk in with six months of unreconciled transactions, personal and business spending tangled together in one account, and there’s cleanup to do before anyone can quote you a sensible monthly figure. Most Melbourne bookkeepers price that catch-up work separately. It’s a one-off, but it can be a real one.
Software sits underneath all of it. Xero, MYOB and QuickBooks are what Melbourne runs on, and a clean file on any of them is quicker and cheaper to work with than a shoebox of receipts or a spreadsheet someone’s been nursing for three years.
Bookkeeper Hourly Rate in Melbourne
The bookkeeper’s hourly rate in Melbourne runs from about $60 to $110 for outsourced work. Where you land in that band depends on who’s doing the work and how hard it is.
| Experience level | Hourly rate (ex GST) |
| Entry-level bookkeeper | $45 to $65 |
| Experienced bookkeeper | $65 to $85 |
| Senior or registered BAS agent | $85 to $110 |
| Bookkeeping firm, structured service | $90 to $120 |
An entry-level bookkeeper is fine for data entry and bank reconciliation. The moment payroll compliance, BAS lodgement or award interpretation enters the picture, you want someone experienced, and you pay for it. That premium is usually money well spent. The cheapest bookkeeper hourly rate in Australia tends to come from people who don’t know what they don’t know, and unwinding their mistakes costs more than doing it right the first time.
Melbourne sits a little above Brisbane and Adelaide in terms of rate, mostly due to higher operating costs and a tighter pool of experienced bookkeepers. National remote bookkeepers often quote $55 to $75 wherever you’re based, which is a big part of why outsourced bookkeeping has caught on with Melbourne businesses in the first place.
Hourly versus monthly: which is cheaper?
Say your books take five hours a month at $75. That’s $375. A fixed monthly bookkeeping service covering the same scope might run $450. The extra $75 buys you a guaranteed turnaround, priority during BAS weeks, and a scope you both agreed to in writing. For anyone with steady transaction volumes, the monthly bookkeeping service wins on value and on not having to flinch when the invoice arrives.
Hourly earns its place for the irregular jobs: a catch-up, a software migration, a one-off cleanup before EOFY.
Monthly Bookkeeping Costs by Business Size
Here’s where bookkeeping costs per month tend to land at different sizes.
| Business size | Transactions/month | Monthly cost |
| Sole trader or micro | Under 50 | $300 to $600 |
| Small business | 50 to 150 | $600 to $1,200 |
| Growing SME | 150 to 400 | $1,200 to $2,500 |
| Larger or complex | 400+ | $2,500 upwards |
Those figures assume the standard kit: reconciliation, transaction coding, accounts payable and receivable, and quarterly BAS prep. Payroll, monthly reporting and software subscriptions usually sit outside the base number.
To put it in real terms: a Melbourne café with eight casuals, daily POS reconciliation and roughly 300 transactions a month is a $1,200 to $1,800 job. A sole-trader tradie doing 40 transactions with a quarterly BAS and no staff can often get sorted for $350 to $500.
Monthly Bookkeeping Packages: What’s In Them and What They Cost
Fixed price bookkeeping has quietly become the default for Melbourne small businesses, and the reason is simple. You know the number before the month starts. No variable invoice, no surprises, a defined scope you can point to. Most bookkeeping packages are built around transaction volume, with the inclusions stepping up at each tier.
Entry tier, around $300 to $600 a month
Sole traders and micro businesses. Monthly bank reconciliation, expense coding, and quarterly BAS prep. Payroll for one or two people might be in the price or might be an add-on, so ask.
Mid-tier, around $600 to $1,200 a month
The bracket most Melbourne small businesses with staff fall into. Full monthly reconciliation, accounts payable and receivable, payroll for a small team, BAS lodgement, and basic monthly reports. Trades, professional services firms and small retailers mostly live here.
Upper tier, $1,200 to $2,500 and up
Higher volumes, messier payroll, more reporting. You’re looking at weekly reconciliation, management reports, payroll across a bigger team, and a bookkeeper who’s close to your numbers in the lead-up to each BAS.
One question to settle before you sign anything: Is BAS lodgement in the monthly figure or billed on top? Some Melbourne bookkeepers fold it in. Others add a few hundred dollars a quarter. Across a year, that gap is real money, and it’s the single most common thing people miss when they compare bookkeeping services pricing between providers.
Remote and Outsourced Bookkeeping Costs
Remote work has pulled the floor out from under old pricing. You’re no longer paying for someone to drive to your office and sit at a spare desk. An experienced outsourced bookkeeper working off your cloud file costs less to deliver, and that shows up in the quote.
Outsourced bookkeeping rates for Melbourne businesses sit in that same $300 to $2,500 a month band, with remote providers generally landing under on-site bookkeepers’ tier for tier. The cost of outsourcing bookkeeping varies with what’s included, but for most small and medium businesses, it comes in well below an in-house hire.
Outsourced versus in-house, in actual dollars. A Melbourne in-house bookkeeper costs $60,000 to $80,000 in salary. Then add super at 11.5 percent, leave, the software licence, and the hours you’ll spend managing them. The all-in figure is a lot more than the salary line suggests, which is the part business owners tend to underestimate.
For most Melbourne businesses turning over under $5 million, outsourcing does the same job for a fraction of that, and it solves a problem the in-house model can’t. When your one bookkeeper is on leave or off sick during a BAS week, the work simply stops. A properly run outsourced arrangement has cover built in.
Bookkeeping Cost Per Transaction: A Melbourne Worked Example
Per-transaction pricing is the model nobody explains properly, so here’s the plain version. Instead of a flat monthly fee, you pay per item processed, usually $1 to $3 a transaction. Eighty transactions cost you somewhere between $80 and $240. Two hundred costs $200 to $600.
It reads as the fairest model on the page. For seasonal businesses, it often isn’t, and here’s why.
Take a Melbourne landscaping outfit. Through winter, it ticks over at maybe 60 transactions a month: a few supplier invoices, fuel, some equipment hire, two pay runs. At $2 each, that’s about $120. Reasonable.
Then spring hits. Now it’s pushing 250 transactions across multiple jobs, with subcontractors to pay, gear to buy and materials moving constantly. Same $2 rate, and the bill is $500 in a single month, landing exactly when the owner is flat out and least able to think about it.
A fixed price bookkeeping package at $600 to $800 covering the whole year, peaks and troughs together, usually works out cheaper once you total twelve months. The per-transaction model feels precise, but precision isn’t the same as cheap. Few Melbourne firms put this pricing front and centre, so if your volumes swing hard, raise it yourself and run the annual numbers both ways before you commit.
What a Melbourne Small Business Pays
National pricing tables flatten out everything that matters locally: Melbourne wages, the industry mix here, and the compliance that applies in Victoria. So here’s the cost of a bookkeeper in practice, by the kind of business that actually walks in the door.
Sole-trader tradie, no staff
A plumber, 35 to 50 transactions a month, quarterly BAS, no payroll.
Around $350 to $550 a month. Covers monthly reconciliation, expense coding, quarterly BAS prep and lodgement.
Café, eight casual staff
Daily POS reconciliation, suppliers paid a few times a week, fortnightly casual payroll across mixed award classifications, and a monthly report.
Around $1,200 to $1,800 a month. Covers regular reconciliation, award-rate payroll, STP Phase 2 lodgement, BAS, and a basic P&L.
Consultancy, four salaried staff
Ten to fifteen client invoices a month, straightforward GST, quarterly BAS, a tidy Xero file.
Around $600 to $950 a month. Covers monthly reconciliation, payroll, quarterly BAS, and accounts receivable.
Retailer, six staff
Between 200 and 280 transactions a month, POS integration, stock purchasing, and a mix of casual and part-time payroll.
Around $1,000 to $1,600 a month. Covers weekly reconciliation, payroll, BAS, and basic inventory.
These aren’t plucked from the air. They’re what businesses at these sizes pay once they move to a structured arrangement with a registered BAS agent.
The Charges That Catch People Out
The headline package rarely tells the whole story. These are the bookkeeping charges that tend to surface after the fact.
BAS is billed separately. Some quotes cover reconciliation and coding but quietly leave BAS out. Confirm it’s in before you sign.
Payroll as an extra. Bookkeeping and payroll are often priced apart. Ten casuals on a fortnightly run adds up meaningfully over a month.
Catch-up fees. Behind on your books? Expect a one-off charge to clear the backlog before the ongoing work starts. Standard practice. Budget for it rather than getting blindsided on invoice one.
Software. Xero, MYOB and QuickBooks all carry their own monthly cost. Sometimes the package absorbs it. Often it doesn’t, so fold it into your real bookkeeping costs per month.
Scope creep. You’re on a fixed package, then you ask for a custom report or for someone to chase a slow-paying debtor. Fair asks, but if they’re outside scope, they’re charged by the hour. A scope agreed in writing at the start is the thing that stops this from becoming a monthly irritation.
The fix for all of it is the same. Get the scope in writing before you start, with base fee, add-ons, and exclusions all spelled out.
Are Bookkeeping Fees Tax Deductible?
Yes. Bookkeeping and payroll fees are fully deductible in Australia as long as they relate to earning your business income. That covers your monthly fee, BAS prep and lodgement, payroll processing, financial reporting and the cost of your accounting software.
The ATO treats all of it as an ordinary running cost. Keep the invoices, code them to an accounting or bookkeeping category in Xero or MYOB, and confirm anything unusual with your tax agent.
If your books are the thing you keep pushing to next week, or you’re not sure your current setup is keeping you compliant, that’s usually the moment to get them looked at properly.
We work with Melbourne small businesses to keep the numbers accurate, lodged on time, and in line with what the ATO expects. Speak with us, and we’ll tell you what your setup would cost.
FAQs: Bookkeeping Costs in Melbourne
How much does a bookkeeper cost per hour in Melbourne?
Between $60 and $110 an hour, depending on experience. Basic reconciliation sits at the bottom of that range. Registered BAS agents handling payroll and compliance sit at the top. National remote bookkeepers often undercut Melbourne-based ones for comparable work.
What’s the average monthly bookkeeping cost for a Melbourne small business?
Budget $600 to $1,200 a month if you’ve got a small team, since that range usually covers your monthly reconciliation, the payroll, and a quarterly BAS. Sole traders with light transaction volumes get away with less, often $300 to $550. It climbs from there once you add staff, and a busier operation with a bigger headcount and higher transaction volumes can sit at $1,500 to $2,500 or more, depending on how much of the work you’re handing over.
How do outsourced bookkeeping rates compare to hiring in-house?
An in-house bookkeeper costs $60,000 to $80,000 in salary alone, and that’s before you’ve added super, paid leave, and the software they’ll need. Realistically, the true cost lands higher again once you count the hours you spend managing them. Outsourced bookkeeping rates cover the same workload for somewhere around a quarter to a third of that across a year, and you’re not left stranded when one person takes annual leave in the middle of a BAS period.
What is per-transaction bookkeeping, and what does it cost?
You pay per item processed, typically $1 to $3 in Melbourne. It suits businesses with volumes that swing month to month. For steady businesses, a fixed monthly package is almost always cheaper and easier to plan around.
What’s included in a fixed monthly bookkeeping package?
Bank reconciliation, transaction coding, and accounts payable and receivable as standard. Quarterly BAS prep is in with many providers and extra with others. Payroll, management reports and software often sit outside the base fee. Check the scope line by line before you commit.
Is it worth getting a bookkeeper for a small Melbourne business?
Usually, once you’ve got staff, you’re registered for GST, or you’re past about 50 transactions a month. The fees are deductible, and doing it yourself carries a time cost plus the risk of errors that the ATO notices. The real question isn’t whether, it’s when.
Do I need a registered BAS agent to lodge my BAS?
Yes. Lodging a BAS on your behalf legally requires registration under the Tax Agent Services Act. An unregistered bookkeeper can prepare it, but can’t lodge it. The Tax Practitioners Board register lets you check in about thirty seconds.
What does catch-up bookkeeping cost in Melbourne?
It’s charged at an hourly rate or as a flat project fee, set after someone’s seen how far behind things are and how many transactions are involved. Most bookkeepers assess the backlog before quoting, so you’ll have a figure before any work starts.
