Bookkeeping Software Cost Calculator

Understanding bookkeeping software costs in Australia

What accounting software actually costs in 2026

Headline subscription pricing for Australian small business accounting platforms in 2026 sits roughly as follows. Starter or lite plans, which cap invoice and bill volume, are $15 to $35 a month. Standard or growing plans, which are what most operating businesses need, are $50 to $95 a month. Premium plans adding multi currency, project tracking and advanced features are $90 to $150. Mid market and entry ERP tiers start around $300 a month and climb steeply. Those numbers alone are misleading though, because they exclude payroll charges and add-on apps. A realistic all in figure for a small business with three employees and a couple of add-ons is $150 to $300 a month, or $1,800 to $3,600 a year, and businesses running inventory or job costing routinely land well above that.

Payroll pricing and how it scales

Payroll is the component that grows with the business and the one most likely to reshape your total. The common Australian model is a base plan with a small number of payroll seats included, often one or two, then a per employee per month charge beyond that of roughly $5 to $12. For a five person business that is $25 to $60 a month on top of the subscription, and for a twenty person business it is $100 to $240. Some platforms instead bundle unlimited or higher payroll allowances into premium tiers, which can be cheaper at scale but means a business with two employees pays a premium subscription to get a payroll allowance it barely uses. The practical advice is to model your headcount over the next two years and price both structures, because the crossover point between per seat and bundled is usually somewhere between eight and fifteen employees.

Add-on apps are where the total doubles

The core subscription is frequently the smaller half of the bill. Receipt and bill capture with OCR runs $20 to $45 a month. Inventory management is $50 to $150. Rostering and time tracking is $40 to $90 plus per employee charges in some products. Job or project costing for trades and agencies is $50 to $100. Debtor chasing automation is $25 to $60. Point of sale integration is $50 to $120. A business that has added three or four of these has doubled or tripled its software cost without ever making a single large purchasing decision, because each one arrived as a modest monthly charge. Before adding any app, check whether the core platform already includes a workable version of the function, since businesses very commonly pay for a specialist tool to do something they already own but never configured.

Single Touch Payroll and Australian compliance requirements

Any platform you use for payroll must report through Single Touch Payroll to the ATO, and STP Phase 2 has been mandatory for all employers for some years now, including businesses with only closely held payees such as family members in a company or trust. STP requires reporting salary and wages, PAYG withholding and superannuation liability information to the ATO on or before each payday, with additional disaggregation of income types and employment conditions under Phase 2. Every mainstream Australian platform handles this natively, but it is a genuine risk if you are considering an overseas product chosen on price, because a platform not built for the Australian market may not support STP, superannuation stream reporting through SuperStream, or the correct treatment of Australian leave entitlements. Confirm STP Phase 2 compliance explicitly before committing, and check the platform is listed by the ATO as a compliant digital service provider.

GST, BAS and getting the file right from the start

Software will not save you from a badly configured file, and the most expensive bookkeeping problems almost always trace back to setup rather than to the product. The chart of accounts should be built for your business and your BAS rather than accepted as a default template, tax codes need to be correctly assigned so that GST free and input taxed transactions are treated properly, and bank feeds and reconciliation rules need to be set up so that coding is consistent rather than left to whoever is doing the reconciliation that week. If you registered for GST you will be lodging a BAS quarterly or monthly, and a file where GST codes are inconsistent produces a BAS that is wrong in both directions. Paying a bookkeeper for three to five hours of proper setup at $70 to $120 an hour is one of the highest return expenditures available to a small business, because it prevents an annual accountant clean up that costs multiples of that.

Software only, or software plus a bookkeeper

Deciding how much of the work to do yourself is a cost question with a clear break point. Doing it yourself costs the subscription plus your time, and works well for a business with straightforward transactions, few employees and an owner comfortable with the mechanics. A periodic bookkeeper review, where you do the day to day coding and a bookkeeper checks and corrects monthly or quarterly, costs $200 to $600 a month on top of software and catches the errors before they compound into a year end problem. Full bookkeeping outsourcing runs $400 to $1,500 a month for a small business depending on transaction volume and payroll complexity. The signal that you have passed the do it yourself point is usually payroll, because payroll errors are both the most consequential and the least forgiving, involving employee entitlements, superannuation deadlines and ATO reporting.

Switching platforms, and why timing matters

Migration is more painful than the marketing suggests, and the cost is mostly in time rather than fees. Transaction history, contacts, chart of accounts and open invoices generally migrate reasonably well with the conversion tools now available. Payroll does not, and moving payroll mid financial year means reconciling year to date gross, tax and superannuation figures, re establishing your STP connection with the ATO, and carrying accrued leave balances across accurately. The clean time to switch is at the start of a financial year, immediately after finalising the previous year's STP, which means planning a July switch in May rather than deciding in September. Budget for a bookkeeper to check the opening balances after migration regardless of how smooth the automated conversion appears, because an undetected opening balance error propagates through every report for the following twelve months.