What bookkeeping actually costs in PEI.

The short answer: monthly bookkeeping with HarperCo is four named flat prices: $395, $625, $850, or $1,200 a month. The Controller scope is $2,450 a month. What sets which one you land on is how many transactions you have, how many accounts, how often you need the books closed, and whether I run your bills and invoices. Most firms here won’t give you a price without a call. I publish mine.

When I read small-business files on the lending side of the desk, the bookkeeping bill showed up in every set of statements — and it never looked the same twice. Hourly here, a monthly rate there, a year-end catch-up invoice nobody saw coming. So before the sales pitch you'll get anywhere else, here's how bookkeeping pricing actually works, and the real numbers I charge.

Why you can't find a straight price

Much of the bookkeeping I saw priced in those files was billed by the hour. That structure has a built-in problem: you're paying rate × hours, and you only control one of those. A messy month costs more than a clean one, a question costs a phone call's worth of minutes, and the invoice is a surprise every single time. Worse, hourly billing quietly rewards slow work — the longer your books take, the bigger the bill. None of that makes anyone dishonest; it's just what the structure does.

The other reason prices hide: “it depends” is true. Transaction volume, number of accounts, payroll, how far behind the books are — they all move the number. But “it depends” shouldn't mean “we won't tell you until you're on a call.” It should mean a short list of what moves the price, and then the price.

How much does a bookkeeper cost in PEI? The real numbers — mine

Every plan is a flat monthly price, month to month, with no setup fee and no exit fee — and your accounting software (QuickBooks Online, Xero, or Sage) is included:

Monthly bookkeeping: four scopes. A scope is how much of the work I do. The Checkup names the smallest one that will keep the books right.

Books Compliance, $395 a month. Clean books, HST filed, and a year-end file, on a quarterly close. The honest answer if nobody is lending to you this year.

Monthly Books, $625 a month. Adds a monthly close and monthly management reports.

Monthly Books Bank-Ready, $850 a month. My standard scope. Closed by the 10th, with the Bank-Ready Report every month. A quarterly review of the books the way a lender reads them. Aging on what you are owed and what you owe, and receipt capture.

Monthly Books Plus, $1,200 a month. Adds bill pay, invoicing and follow-up on what you are owed, a weekly close option, and job costing or inventory. It also includes biweekly payroll for up to 10 employees.

Payroll, priced on how often you run it. A biweekly or semi-monthly cycle is $150 a month plus $8 per employee per month. A weekly cycle is $225 a month plus $8 per employee per month. The reason for two prices is time: a weekly payroll is roughly three times the work of a biweekly one. Two ROEs a year are included, and extra ones are $25 each. That matters if you run a seasonal crew, because every crew member generates one at the end of the season. Onboarding is a one-time $250. You can add payroll to any scope from Monthly Books Bank-Ready up, and to the Fisher Plan. Monthly Books Plus includes biweekly pay runs for your first 10 employees. Each employee after the tenth is $8 a month. Weekly pay on Monthly Books Plus is $75 a month more. The work is the same either way: pay runs, the deductions I send the CRA, a Record of Employment when someone leaves, T4 and T4A slips at year end, and the annual return to your province’s workers’ compensation board (WCB PEI, WCB Nova Scotia, WorkSafeNB or WorkplaceNL). What I don't do at any price is your income tax return. That's your CPA's, and I'm not a public accounting firm.

Controller, $2,450 a month. A finance function: forecast, budget, the handful of numbers that run your business, and someone who talks to your lender on your side of the desk. Less than a part-time finance hire, and less than most fractional-CFO arrangements.

Two situations sit outside the monthly ladder. If the books are months behind, that's a Books Rescue catch-up: $295 for each month you're behind, one flat quote set at the free Checkup, never hourly. The minimum is $885. And if your money arrives by season instead of by month, the Fisher Plan runs from $2,000 a season, billed out of your landings rather than before them.

What decides which scope you land on

What decides which of the four you land on is volume and complexity: how many transactions cross your accounts in a month, how many accounts there are, how often you need reporting, and whether HarperCo handles your bills and invoices. What doesn't move the number: asking questions, one busy month, or needing your numbers ready for a lender in a hurry. That's the point of flat.

When doing it yourself is the right answer

Sometimes it is — and you deserve to hear that from someone who sells bookkeeping. If your business runs a handful of transactions a month, you're comfortable in the software, and you'll actually sit down with it monthly (not each April), DIY plus a year-end accountant is a perfectly good setup. The trouble starts when “I'll catch up next month” becomes a season — that's how a $395 problem becomes a four-figure one.

If the cost you are weighing is project work

Two government programs cost-share professional fees, and both are worth a phone call before you commit to a business plan or a financing package. Innovation PEI’s Small Business Assistance covers 50% of eligible costs, to a ceiling of $4,000 over 24 months. The CBDC Consultant Advisory Services program, funded by ACOA and delivered by the PEI CBDCs, reimburses 75% of professional fees, to a ceiling of $5,000. Both are for PEI businesses. Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland and Labrador run their own. Neither one is administered by us and eligibility is the program’s decision, not ours. The full terms, including what each program excludes, sit on the Financing & Strategy page.

The cost that never shows up on an invoice

From the lending side of the desk, here's what I actually saw priced into messy books: decisions made blind, HST money owed in trust to the CRA quietly funding the float, and financing applications that stalled because the newest numbers were fourteen months old. Your books are the story a lender retells about you to people who will never meet you. Whatever you pay for bookkeeping — me, someone else, or your own evenings — that story is what it buys.

Notes like this are general information, not advice on your specific situation — that’s what the kitchen table is for. — Dominic