The real question is whether you have a full role's worth of work. A bookkeeper on payroll gives you dedicated hours, deep familiarity with your business, and someone who can also chase invoices, handle deposits, and cover office admin — advantages an outside team genuinely can't match. You pay for them with a wage plus payroll taxes, benefits, paid time off, and software, plus the hiring and supervision any employee requires, and you absorb the risk when that one person is sick, on vacation, or resigns. Outsourced bookkeeping is a flat monthly fee — Karbon's starts at $500 — for the books alone. Below a certain volume, the employee is a part-time job you're funding full-time.
See what in-house bookkeeping includes →| Employee Bookkeeper | Karbon | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | A wage plus payroll taxes, benefits, paid time off, and their software — for a full-time role, several times a flat monthly bookkeeping fee. | One flat monthly fee starting at $500, scoped to transaction volume and account count, with no employment costs attached. |
| Dedicated hours | Wins here. Their hours belong to you alone, and a slow week can be redirected to whatever else needs doing. | Hours are proportional to the scope you're paying for, drawn from a team rather than reserved for you. |
| Familiarity with your business | Wins here. Someone in the building learns your vendors, customers, and quirks in a way an outside team only approximates. | Learned through onboarding and the monthly work — good, and not the same as sitting in your office all week. |
| Work beyond the books | Wins here. Invoicing, collections, deposits, vendor calls, and general admin can all sit with the same person. | Bookkeeping only — categorization, reconciliation, the monthly close, and reporting. |
| Coverage and continuity | One person is a single point of failure: vacation, illness, or a resignation stops the close and takes knowledge with it. | A team covers the work, so the close doesn't depend on one person's calendar or notice period. |
| Hiring and supervision | You recruit, interview, train, review, and replace if it doesn't work out — owner time before and after the hire. | No hiring. Scope is agreed up front and re-scoped as volume changes. |
| Separation of duties | One person recording transactions and touching money concentrates both in the same hands. Solvable with owner review, but it has to be deliberate. | The people keeping the records aren't the people handling your money — the separation comes built in. |
| Time to a clean close | Recruiting and onboarding commonly runs weeks to months before the first clean month lands. | Starts after a free review of your current books, with a catch-up pass first if prior months are behind. |
| Flexing with volume | A salary is fixed whether the month was your busiest or your slowest. | Flat rate scoped to volume and re-scoped when the business changes shape, with no long-term lock-in. |
Neither option is right for every business. Here's a fair view of where each one fits best.
Where Karbon has the edge: continuity and cost shape. Past a certain volume an employee bookkeeper is the better answer, and we'd tell you so — below that line you're funding idle hours and carrying key-person risk for work a flat monthly fee covers. Karbon's bookkeeping is in-house on our side too: the same people every month rather than an offshore processing pool, starting at $500 a month with no long-term lock-in.
It depends almost entirely on whether the work fills the role. A full-time bookkeeper costs a wage plus payroll taxes, benefits, paid time off, and software, and that total is fixed whether the month was busy or quiet. Outsourced bookkeeping is priced to the volume it covers. If your books genuinely need a full week's work every week, the employee is often better value; if they need a few hours, you're paying for availability rather than work.
That's a fair middle ground and worth pricing out. The trade-offs: part-time roles in this niche can be hard to fill and to retain, one person is still a single point of failure for the close, and supervision still lands on you. Outsourcing solves coverage and hiring; a part-time hire keeps more of the in-house familiarity. Both beat the books not getting done.
You do — and that's the arrangement to insist on with any provider. The work should happen in a file on your subscription, under your ownership, with your access intact. Karbon works in QuickBooks Online by default, or in whatever you already use, and there's no long-term lock-in: if you leave, the books and the file stay yours.
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.