At low volume, DIY genuinely wins — and that isn't a sales concession. If you're a solo operator with one bank account, one card, no payroll, and a handful of transactions a month, doing your own books in QuickBooks Online or similar costs a software subscription and an hour or two of your time, and there's no honest argument for paying someone else. The math flips as volume grows: more accounts, payment processors, payroll, and mixed personal spending turn a one-hour task into a recurring one you postpone — and postponed books get expensive at filing time. Karbon's in-house bookkeeping starts at $500 a month, flat, scoped to your transaction volume.
See what in-house bookkeeping includes →| DIY in QuickBooks | Karbon | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | Wins here, clearly. A software subscription and your own time — nothing else. | A flat monthly fee starting at $500, scoped to transaction volume and account count, on top of the software. |
| Your own time | An hour or two a month at low volume; several evenings once accounts, processors, and payroll multiply. | Your time drops to answering the occasional question about a transaction only you can explain. |
| Knowing your own numbers | Wins here. Touching every transaction builds a feel for the business that no report fully replaces. | You get a monthly P&L and can ask about any line — but you're reading the numbers rather than entering them. |
| Control of the file | Wins here. Nobody else is in your ledger, and every entry is a decision you made yourself. | The subscription and the file stay in your name with your access intact; the work happens inside it, not away from it. |
| Consistency | Depends entirely on a busy owner's discipline, and the first month skipped is rarely the last. | A close happens every month, including the months that got busy. |
| Catching errors | A wrong rule repeats silently — one miscategorization applied automatically for eleven months before anyone notices. | Reconciliation is where errors surface, and it's done by someone whose only job that month is to look. |
| Cost when it goes wrong | Catch-up at filing time is the same job in its expensive form — under deadline, often at professional rates. | If the books are behind, a catch-up and clean-up pass comes first, then the monthly rhythm starts. |
| Tax-time handoff | Straightforward if you closed each month; painful if “the books” are a bank export and a folder of receipts. | Reconciled books and statements your CPA can file from without billing cleanup hours first. |
Neither option is right for every business. Here's a fair view of where each one fits best.
Where Karbon has the edge: not the price. DIY is cheaper, always, and at low volume it's also the right answer. The edge is in the months you don't get to it — bookkeeping's real cost isn't the monthly hour, it's the compounding one, where eleven months of a wrong rule surfaces at filing time. Our books are kept in-house on a monthly rhythm starting at $500, quoted after a free look at what you already have, with no long-term lock-in.
At low volume, yes. Accounting software handles the mechanics well — bank feeds import transactions, rules suggest categories, and reports build themselves. What it can't do is decide whether a charge was a supply, an asset, or an owner draw, or notice that a rule has been quietly miscategorizing something all year. If you review the suggestions and reconcile monthly, DIY works fine. If those two steps are what keep slipping, the software isn't the part that's failing.
There's no universal transaction count — the honest test is behavioral. If you've missed two or more monthly closes in a row, if you can't answer what you spent on a category last quarter without a manual export, or if your accountant's bill includes cleanup hours, the workload has outgrown the time you have. Payroll, inventory, and multiple payment processors each move that line closer.
That's a catch-up job before it's a bookkeeping job, and it's common. The fix is a clean-up pass to bring prior months current and reconciled, after which the monthly rhythm begins. Karbon's free review of your current books is where the size of that catch-up gets scoped, so you know what's involved before committing to anything.
Book a free 15-minute call. If the other option on this page is the better fit for your situation, we'll tell you that too.