Pricing
How much should bookkeeping cost?
Hourly billing hides the real number. Here is what actually drives the price of bookkeeping, and what a fair fixed monthly fee looks like.
7 May 2026 · 5 min read · By the Meridian team
Volume and messiness, not revenue
A consultancy turning over five million with forty transactions a month is cheaper to keep books for than a café turning over eight hundred thousand across three thousand card payments. Price should track transaction count, number of bank and payment accounts, currencies, and how disciplined your paperwork is.
What a fair fixed fee looks like
For a small trading company with clean cloud records, expect roughly SAR 750 to SAR 1,500 or £150 to £300 per month for bookkeeping with VAT. Add payroll, management accounts and a tax return and a mid-sized business typically lands between SAR 1,900 and SAR 4,000, or £390 to £800. Anything materially below that is usually offshore data entry with no qualified review.
Questions that expose a bad quote
Ask what happens when the fee is exceeded, who actually does the work and what their qualification is, how many working days after month end the books are closed, and whether software subscriptions are inside or outside the fee. Vague answers on any of the four reliably predict an invoice you did not expect.
Cheap bookkeeping is expensive later
Reconstructing a year of misposted records before an audit or a ZATCA query routinely costs more than a year of doing it properly. The saving is real only until the first time someone official asks a question.