That figure is not an estimate. It is the median advertised pay on Colorado bookkeeping jobs posted right now, carried to a fully loaded cost using the federal benefits ratio. Below it, the job itself — all 28 tasks the U.S. Department of Labor says it is made of — and which of them we take off the desk.
Where the number comes from
We do not have an industry study and we are not going to quote one. What we have is the job market you are hiring into, read directly, and two federal datasets. Here is the whole derivation, so you can argue with it.
Four search terms — bookkeeper, bookkeeping, accounting clerk, office manager bookkeeping — against Google Jobs on 25 August 2026. 280 unique postings, 161 of them in Colorado once each posting's own location line is checked.
64 of those 161 state a pay rate. Median midpoint $27.00/hour. Middle half between $23.08 and $30.93. Restricted to full-time only, 53 postings, median $27.50.
A salary is not a cost. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics measures the gap every quarter: in March 2026, wages and salaries were 69.9% of total employer compensation cost in private industry — $32.60 of $46.60 an hour. Benefits were the other 30.1%.
$56,160 ÷ 0.699 = $80,343. We round it down to $80,300 on this page.
O*NET — the Department of Labor's occupational database — lists 28 discrete tasks for Bookkeeping, Accounting and Auditing Clerks (SOC 43-3031). Not our list. Theirs.
The five modules below map onto 25 of those 28. The three they do not touch are named further down, in their own words, rather than quietly dropped.
The product
Each one is priced on its own because each one is a different amount of work. Every module posts into the accounting system you already run — QuickBooks in most cases — and none of them asks your bookkeeper to learn a new ledger. Under each is the exact O*NET task text it covers, so "what does this actually do" has a written answer before you buy.
Receipts, bills and order forms arrive from wherever they live — a truck console, a text thread, an inbox — and land coded, matched and queued.
Covers 4 of the 28 tasksThe keying step. Transactions classified, posted to the right accounts, and checked for the errors a person makes at 4pm on a Friday.
Covers 5 of the 28 tasksWhat matches, clears itself. Your bookkeeper opens one screen holding only the items that genuinely need a human decision.
Covers 5 of the 28 tasksMoney out and money in, on a schedule, with an approval record showing who said yes and when.
Covers 4 of the 28 tasksJob costing while the job is still open, plus the recurring compile-and-send work that eats the end of every month.
Covers 7 of the 28 tasksNamed here rather than left for you to discover. Nothing we build touches these, and any vendor who says otherwise is selling you a demo.
3 of the 28 stay humanPrice
Build is one time and yours to keep — you own the code and the data outright. The monthly is month to month, cancel any month, and covers hosting, monitoring, support and small changes as your process changes. No per-seat fee, no per-transaction fee, and additional locations are priced once inside the build rather than added to the monthly.
| Scope | Build | Monthly | Year one | Share of one hire | Year two on |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DiagnosticHalf a day, written findings, no build | $450 | — | $450 | 0.6% | — |
| One moduleWhichever one is eating the most time | $3,500 | $400 | $8,300 | 10% | $4,800 |
| Three modulesThe usual shape | $6,500 | $650 | $14,300 | 18% | $7,800 |
| All five25 of the 28 tasks | $9,500 | $650 | $17,300 | 22% | $7,800 |
The full build, every module, is 22% of what one bookkeeper costs you in year one — and under 10% every year after that, because the build is already paid for and already yours.
What it is not is a replacement for the person. Somebody still runs this. The honest version of the claim is narrower and more useful: the person you have, or the one you are about to hire, stops spending their week on 25 of the 28 things this job is made of — and starts spending it on the three that need judgment, plus the work you actually wanted them for.
Straight answer
Receipt capture and AP routing are real product categories with real products in them. Dext runs about $25 a month. Hubdoc is free with Xero. Ramp's AP is free. Bill.com sells the same shape at scale.
If your workflow looks like everyone else's, one of those is the cheaper answer and we will say so on the call rather than after the invoice.
What off-the-shelf tools cannot do is bend. They assume a shape. If your job numbers, your approval chain, your crews or your system of record do not fit that shape, you end up paying a subscription and keeping the manual step you bought it to remove.
That is a build, not a licence — and it is the only situation where this is worth $3,500 to you.
This offer has not been delivered to a client yet. The modules are built on components we run elsewhere, and the prices above are set against the market, not against measured build hours on a job like yours.
You would be early. That is worth knowing before the diagnostic, not after.
Half a day. We sit with whoever currently does this work and time where the week actually goes, module by module. You get written findings naming which modules are worth building for you and which are not — and if the answer is "buy Dext", that is what the document will say. The $450 comes off the build if you go ahead.
Book the diagnostic