Bookkeeping Managed Service Plans

How Launch sells and structures full-charge bookkeeping engagements. The short version: full-charge bookkeeping is a managed service plan, not an hourly engagement. Hourly is only for DIY support and one-off consulting calls.

Why managed-service-only

Hourly bookkeeping creates a predictable client-relationship problem:

• The bill is invisible until it lands. A bad month for the business (city annual taxes due, sudden surge in transactions, year-end cleanup) is also a bad month for the bill. The two compound.
• Clients badly underestimate their transaction count. They say "low volume" and mean "5 invoices a week." They actually have 250 line items because every Square deposit, every farmer's market day, and every reimbursement counts.
• The relationship turns adversarial. Every hour billed feels like we're profiting from their disorganization. Even when the work is appropriate, the experience is bad.

A fixed monthly fee fixes all three.

The three tiers

Tier the client by transaction volume plus the complexity multipliers below. Tier limits are monthly transaction counts, not hours.

Above 500 transactions per month: custom-quote in coordination with Emma. We rarely sell above Tier 3 without a custom scope.

What counts as one transaction

This is where clients get confused. Be explicit during the quote:

• One transaction = one line item in the bank feed. Not one sale, one customer, or one product.
• A full day of cafe sales that lands as one Square deposit is one transaction, even if there were 200 individual customer purchases.
• A farmer's market day that's one PNC ACH = one transaction.
• One Uber Eats payout per week = one transaction.
• An invoice paid via Stripe is one bank deposit (transaction) + one Stripe fee deduction (transaction).

A simple cafe with one POS deposit per day plus a few supplier bills is probably 50 to 80 transactions per month. A multi-channel food business is usually 200+.

Complexity multipliers

When the quote is on the line between two tiers, these push it up:

• Number of bank + credit card accounts — every additional account is more reconciliation
• Number of revenue streams — Square, Stripe, Uber, DoorDash, farmer's market cash, online store, wholesale, etc.
• Payroll — adds reconciliation + tax filings
• Sales tax / B&O / city tax filings — monthly vs quarterly vs annual changes the monthly load
• Inventory tracking — adds time
• Multi-state / multi-city — separate filings per jurisdiction

When the Flex Plan is the right answer instead

Some businesses don't fit a managed plan and should be on a Flex Plan (a capped hourly bucket like Daria's 20-hour plan):

• Very simple business: 1099 only, no inventory, single account, predictable
• Hours used cover bookkeeping AND ancillary work (HR, light advisory, contracts, etc.)
• Total monthly time genuinely fits within a fixed-hour bucket without margin pressure
• Client wants a single multi-discipline subscription and is willing to time-box

The test: if the client could blow past the cap on a single bad month, they need a managed plan instead.

Quoting procedure

Engagement structure (what's in the contract)

Every managed plan engagement letter spells out:

• Tier name + transaction ceiling
• Meeting frequency — Tier 1 monthly, Tier 2 monthly with quarterly deep-dive, Tier 3 biweekly
• Tax filing schedule we own — monthly excise, quarterly DOR, annual B&O, etc. (Tax preparation by a CPA is separate.)
• Bookkeeping team — primary bookkeeper + reviewer
• The 90-day re-evaluation clause (above)
• Out-of-scope add-ons — clean-up of prior periods, audit support, cash-flow modeling, special reporting — all billed at flat rates, never hourly

What's NOT included in any tier

Be loud about this in the proposal so it doesn't feel like a bait-and-switch later:

• Annual federal tax return — that's the CPA's work, separate engagement
• Catch-up bookkeeping for prior periods — flat fee, scoped separately
• Audit defense / IRS notice response — flat fee per response
• Cash-flow forecasting — separate advisory engagement
• Investor / lender reporting packages — separate flat fee
• DIY support calls (we walk you through your own QuickBooks) — these stay hourly under the Flex tier

How to handle clients who push back on "fixed fee feels high"

It's almost always cheaper than they think when you compare to hourly. Run the math out loud:

• Their hourly bookkeeping last month: X hours × $rate = $Y
• Their tier price: $Z
• If $Y was an outlier, point out that the tier protects them against any future $Y month
• If $Y was typical, the tier is at or below what they'd pay hourly anyway — and removes the ceiling risk

If they still push, the answer is Flex Plan or no engagement. We don't go back to open-ended hourly bookkeeping.

Internal handoff when an existing hourly client moves to managed

Edge cases the policy doesn't cover

• Brand-new business with no transaction history: Quote Tier 1 with the 90-day re-eval. If they exceed, move them up at month 3.
• Seasonal business (high summer / low winter): Average the year, quote one tier, accept that summer months will be busier work-for-work. Don't sell two-tiers-by-season — too confusing.
• Multiple legal entities for one owner: One managed plan per entity. No bundling across entities (different tax filings, different books).
• Client wants to keep doing their own data entry: That's not a managed plan, that's Flex. Don't sell a tier just to maintain a relationship — you'll regret it.