🎯 The business: monthly bookkeeping for small businesses, plus tax returns in season. Essential, recurring, and busier when money is tight, because that is when people stop doing their own books. A laptop, a credential and a client list you build one referral at a time.
Contractors, restaurants, salons, landlords and every other business on this page. Monthly bookkeeping bills $300 to $1,000 depending on volume; a small business tax return $800 to $2,500; individual returns $200 to $600. Payroll processing and sales tax filings are add-ons that make clients stickier. Forty monthly clients is a full practice.
| Software (QuickBooks accountant program, tax software, document portal) | $2,000 to $5,000 a year |
| IRS Preparer Tax Identification Number, Enrolled Agent exam path if you want to represent clients | $20 to $1,500 |
| LLC, errors and omissions insurance | $1,500 to $3,000 |
| Engagement letter templates reviewed by an attorney | $500 |
| Website and a Google Business profile | $500 |
| All-in | ≈ $5,000 to $10,000 |
Pick one or two industries you understand and become the bookkeeper for them specifically. Offer a free cleanup assessment to five businesses through your own network. Set monthly fixed fees, never hourly; clients want to know the number. Build a onboarding checklist so every client’s books look the same. Become a QuickBooks or Xero certified advisor; the directory listing sends leads.
Thirty monthly clients averaging $500 is $15,000 a month before tax season adds $30,000 to $60,000 of returns. Software and insurance are a small share; your time is the cost. A solo practice commonly settles around $120,000 to $200,000 of revenue, and the first hire (a junior bookkeeper at $25 to $35 an hour) is what lets it grow past your own hours.
A PTIN to prepare returns for pay, and the Enrolled Agent credential or CPA license to represent clients before the IRS. A handful of states (California, Oregon, Maryland, New York among them) regulate tax preparers separately. Data security rules: the IRS requires a written information security plan from every preparer. Engagement letters for every client.
Tax season, which is twelve weeks of seventy-hour weeks until you hire. A client who hands you a shoebox in March. An error that becomes your liability. Scope creep into advice you are not credentialed to give. The practices that last choose their clients, charge for cleanup, and build the staff before the season that would break them.