🎯 The business: monthly books for small businesses in the UK and Australia, done from your desk in the same software they already use (Xero dominates both markets, QuickBooks is there too). Same language, familiar rules once learned, and your working day ends as theirs begins.
Tradespeople, consultants, cafes, e-commerce sellers and small agencies with 1 to 20 staff, often referred by their accountant, who wants clean books and does not want to do them. Monthly fees of £150 to £600 or A$300 to A$1,000 depending on volume. Accountancy practices also outsource bookkeeping in bulk; one practice can be ten clients at once.
| LLC and EIN | $130 |
| Xero advisor certification (free) and a practice subscription | $0 to $50 a month |
| A short course on UK VAT and Australian GST and BAS basics | $200 to $600 |
| Professional indemnity insurance | $500 to $1,200 a year |
| Website, Wise account, document portal | $200 |
| All-in | ≈ $1,000 to $2,200 |
Get Xero certified and list in its advisor directory for the UK and Australia. Learn the two things that differ from U.S. books: VAT returns and Making Tax Digital in the UK, GST and the quarterly BAS in Australia. Write to twenty small accountancy practices offering overflow bookkeeping at a fixed monthly rate per client. Take the first two clients at a discount for a testimonial.
Twenty clients at an average of $450 a month is $9,000 a month with software as your only real cost. The work is four to eight hours a client a month once set up, so twenty clients is roughly a full week. A junior bookkeeper in the Philippines or the U.S. at $20 to $30 an hour lets you take forty.
Bookkeeping is unregulated in the U.S. In the UK, anyone providing bookkeeping services must be supervised for anti-money-laundering purposes, usually by joining a body such as the ICB or AAT; in Australia, lodging BAS for clients requires registration as a BAS agent with the Tax Practitioners Board, which has experience requirements. Stay on the bookkeeping side of that line, or partner with a registered agent, until you qualify.
A client whose previous books were fiction and expect you to fix a year for one month’s fee; price cleanups separately. Data privacy obligations under UK GDPR and the Australian Privacy Act. A tax rule you learned last year that changed. The practices that last specialize by industry, bill monthly in advance, and keep a registered accountant on each side for the filings.