Low-cost bookkeeping for small businesses — flat-fee services, software with a human bolted on, and the do-it-yourself route — written up one at a time, with the trade-off printed on the slip instead of a figure at the bottom.
This site went up before its first write-up. Nothing is published yet; what follows is what will go on the spike.
Cheap means the low end of what a real service costs, not free. Where a price appears it will come from the provider's own page, and the write-up will say when it was read.
Bench, Pilot, Merritt, Xendoo and Wave sit at very different points on cost and on what the fee includes. Each one gets its own slip.
These are spoken for already — listed as topics, not as finished pieces. None of them is written yet.
Where the monthly-fee services actually differ once the headline rate stops being the difference.
Every low-cost option trades something away — catch-up work, a named bookkeeper, tax filing. Sorted by which.
What the DIY route asks of you in hours each month before it saves you anything.
When handing the books over earns its fee over software you run yourself, and when it plainly does not.
Months behind is where cheap gets expensive. What to ask before handing anyone a backlog.
Onboarding, catch-up, per-account charges and tax season are where quotes stop matching each other.
Worth stating while the spike is still empty, because it is what the writing will be held to.
No ratings, no stars, no tier boards. Where one service is the better buy, it will say so in a sentence you can argue with.
Each write-up says what it is based on. Nothing here will describe a hands-on trial nobody ran.
Some links may earn a commission. That moves nothing up the spike, and the page says so wherever it applies.
How far behind your books are sets the price more than the provider does. Count the months first.
A cheap tier is defined by its exclusions. Those are the lines worth putting next to each other.
Published pricing and quoted pricing drift apart. The quote is the document that matters later.
When the first write-ups go up they will appear above, one slip each. Until then the spike is empty and this page says so.