Bookkeeper vs Accountant: What Each Does, and Which You Need

A bookkeeper records what happened: money in, money out, accounts reconciled, a set of monthly statements at the end of it. An accountant works on what those statements mean: the year-end adjustments, the tax return, the structure of the business, the decisions that follow from the numbers. Neither “bookkeeper” nor “accountant” is a licensed or protected title in the United States, so the word on the business card tells you very little. The credential that does carry legal weight is the CPA license, which a state board of accountancy grants and which is a separate thing from either job title.

The short version: the bookkeeping job needs doing every month and the accounting job at least once a year, and the useful questions for a candidate are what they will do monthly, what they will hand your tax preparer at year end, and whether they hold a credential you can verify.

Bookkeeper vs accountant at a glance

That last row is a wage, not a price. It is what the Bureau of Labor Statistics measures people being paid as employees, and it is not what anyone charges a client. More on that gap below.

What a bookkeeper actually does

Bookkeeping is the production of the record. In practice it means entering or importing transactions and coding them to the right account, reconciling every bank and credit card account to a statement, keeping accounts payable and accounts receivable current, running payroll or handing the payroll provider clean data, and closing each month so the profit and loss statement and balance sheet mean something on the day they are printed.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics classifies the work as bookkeeping, accounting and auditing clerks, and gives typical entry-level education as “some college, no degree.” No exam, license or degree is required to do the job or to use the title.

What a bookkeeping engagement does not include, unless it says so, is the judgment calls. Whether a purchase is an expense or an asset, whether an owner’s draw should be reclassified as compensation, whether revenue belongs in this period or the next: those are accounting decisions. Left out of the monthly scope, they land on whoever prepares the return, at that person’s rate.

What an accountant actually does

“Accountant” is a description of work rather than a credential, and it covers a wide range. For a small business, the work on offer under that word is taking the bookkeeper’s output and making it correct and useful: adjusting entries, depreciation, accruals and prepayments, the year-end close, then the tax return and the planning conversations that go with it, then advice on structure, owner compensation and what the numbers are saying about the business.

Because the title carries no requirement, the range of people using it runs from someone with a bookkeeping background and no formal qualification to a licensed CPA in public practice. That is why the credential matters more than the noun, and why the next section is the one to read before you hire.

Neither title is licensed, and one credential is called a license anyway

No US state licenses bookkeepers. Two voluntary, privately issued credentials exist, and neither is a license in the sense a state means it:

• The American Institute of Professional Bookkeepers issues the Certified Bookkeeper (CB) designation through what it calls “the national Certified Bookkeeper (CB) exam.” Its own guidance on who the training is for reads: “To understand the training materials, you should be a working bookkeeper or have 1 year of college accounting or the equivalent.”
• The National Association of Certified Public Bookkeepers issues the Certified Public Bookkeeper (CPB), which NACPB itself calls a license. Its page states that the credential “is accredited by Consortia Accounting School,” a private registered postsecondary school, and that holders must agree to abide by the CPB Professional Code of Conduct and obtain “24 hours of CPE each year beginning the year after you obtain your license.”

The word “license” there is the trap. It is issued by a membership association and accredited by a private school, not granted by any state, and losing it does not stop anyone from working as a bookkeeper. A reader searching for “bookkeeper license” will find that page and reasonably conclude that state regulation exists behind it. It does not. Both credentials are still worth something as evidence that someone has studied the work and submitted to a code of conduct, which is more than the unqualified title tells you.

The CPA title is different, and it is protected by statute. North Carolina’s General Statute 93-3 makes it unlawful for a person without a certificate of qualification “to assume or use such a title, or to use any words, letters, abbreviations, symbols or other means of identification to indicate that the person using same has been admitted to practice as a certified public accountant.” The same state’s G.S. 93-6 expressly permits a non-CPA to practice, provided that person “uses the term ‘accountant’ and only the term ‘accountant’ in connection with his name on all reports, letters of transmittal, or advice, and on all stationery and documents used in connection with his services as an accountant.” New York similarly reserves “certified public accountant,” “CPA,” “public accountant” and “PA” to licensees. Those are two states cited as examples: title rules are state law and differ, so the authority for your own state is its board of accountancy.

Where a CPA and an enrolled agent sit relative to both

Two credentials change what the person may do rather than how well they do it.

A CPA is licensed by a state board of accountancy, the District of Columbia or a US territory. The IRS describes the requirements as passing the Uniform CPA Examination, completing college or university accounting study, meeting experience and good character requirements, complying with ethical standards and completing continuing education. What the license uniquely buys is attest work: audits, reviews and similar reports may only be issued by CPAs in licensed firms. If a lender, investor, franchisor or bonding company asks for reviewed or audited financial statements, no bookkeeper and no unlicensed accountant is an option. What the CPA license actually changes covers that credential in full.

An enrolled agent is licensed federally, by the IRS, for tax matters. The IRS describes an EA as someone who has “earned the privilege of representing taxpayers before the Internal Revenue Service by either passing a three-part comprehensive IRS test covering individual and business tax returns, or through experience as a former IRS employee,” subject to ethical standards and 72 hours of continuing education every three years. Enrolled agents, CPAs and attorneys all have what the IRS calls unlimited representation rights, meaning they may represent a taxpayer on any matter before the IRS, including audits, collections and appeals, whether or not they prepared the return. An EA cannot issue an audit or a review. For tax work and IRS representation, an EA holds the same authority a CPA does.

Anyone with a preparer tax identification number may prepare and sign a federal return for payment, credentialed or not. As of September 1, 2026 the IRS counted 886,338 PTIN holders, of whom 209,076 were CPAs and 71,966 were enrolled agents. PTIN holders with no credential have had no authority to represent clients before the IRS since January 1, 2016.

What each is paid, and why that is not what each charges

A wage is what an employee is paid. A billing rate is what a firm charges a client, and it carries that person’s salary, payroll taxes, benefits, unbilled time, software, insurance, premises and the firm’s profit. Confusing the two produces most of the wrong numbers written about this subject.

Here is the wage data, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook, May 2025 reference period, pages last modified August 27, 2026.

The spread inside each occupation is wide. The lowest-paid 10 percent of bookkeeping clerks earned less than $36,000 and the highest-paid 10 percent more than $74,550. For accountants and auditors the same figures are less than $56,020 and more than $144,090.

The projected decline for bookkeeping clerks is BLS’s own projection rather than a commentator’s, and it is the single most consequential number on this page for anyone deciding how to staff the work. It does not say the job disappears. It says the number of people employed to do it is expected to fall over ten years, while accountants and auditors grow, which is consistent with software absorbing the data entry and reconciliation while the judgment work stays.

The gap between a wage and a price shows up plainly in the fee data. The last National Society of Accountants Income and Fees survey, conducted in 2020 and covering 2019 and 2020, put the average hourly fee a small accounting firm charged for QuickBooks and bookkeeping advisory work at $108.61 and for write-up work at $105.51, against a BLS median bookkeeper wage of $24.36 an hour. That is roughly four times the wage, for the same underlying task.

What each costs

The numbers for each are set out in full in the cost guides rather than repeated here, but the shape is worth knowing before you ask for quotes.

Bookkeeping is bought three ways: as an employee at a wage plus employment costs, as an independent or virtual provider on a monthly fee, or from an accounting firm at an hourly rate. How much a bookkeeper costs prices all three. National online services publish entry prices from $99 to $399 a month as of September 2026, and among those providers only 1-800Accountant’s Starter plan and Bench’s $649 a month tier include a business tax return in the price, so the return is a separate line for nearly everyone. What bookkeeping services cost sets out each provider’s published price and what the tier actually contains.

Accounting work is priced per return, per hour or on retainer. The same 2019 to 2020 NSA survey averaged $179.71 an hour for federal and state tax return work as a service line, $323 for a Form 1040 with Schedule A plus a state return, $903 for an S corporation return and $733 for a partnership return. Those figures are six years old, fees have risen since, and no current public survey measures by how much. How much a CPA costs and CPA hourly rates go through what the surveys do and do not support, and what tax preparation costs covers the field beyond CPA firms.

Buying both, worked through

A single-owner S corporation buying flat-rate bookkeeping monthly and an accountant once a year pays two bills. Merritt Bookkeeping publishes a fixed $250 a month with no tiers as of September 2026, which is $250 times 12, or $3,000 for the year. Add the NSA survey averages for the returns: $903 for the Form 1120-S plus $323 for the owner’s Form 1040 with Schedule A and a state return comes to $1,226. The two together are $4,226.

Treat that as an illustration of the ratio rather than a quote. The monthly figure is one vendor’s current list price and the annual figure is a six-year-old national mean from a survey of small accounting and tax firms. What it shows is the shape of the year: on these two figures the recurring bookkeeping line is more than twice the annual accounting line, and it is the one that quietly sets your budget.

Which one do you need?

• A new business with few transactions and no payroll. The bookkeeping job is small enough to do yourself in software, and what you need to buy is the return. Our guide to accounting software covers what each system costs and can do.
• Transactions every week, payroll running, or stock to track. This is where the bookkeeping job needs an owner who is not you. Buy it monthly, and agree in writing what “closed” means and by which date.
• An entity return to file, or tax that is no longer simple. This is accounting work, and it is worth buying from someone credentialed. For the return and for anything that might end up in front of the IRS, an enrolled agent carries the same representation rights as a CPA.
• A lender, investor or franchisor has asked for financial statements. If the word is “reviewed” or “audited”, only a CPA in a licensed firm can sign it. Start there, because it constrains everything else.
• The numbers arrive too late or nobody trusts them. That is not solved by a cheaper bookkeeper. Fractional CFO sets out what the forward-looking role covers and how those engagements are shaped.

The question is rarely one or the other. It is who does the monthly work, who does the annual work, and whether those two people talk to each other without you having to referee it.

How to find the right one

Ask each candidate for scope in writing: what is done monthly, what is done annually, when the month is closed, who reviews the work, and what happens to the price if the books need catching up first. Ask who holds the login to your accounting software, and make sure the answer is you. Where someone claims a credential, check it rather than the description: a CPA license is issued by a state board of accountancy, so that board is the authority, and NASBA runs a multi-state lookup at cpaverify.org whose database is aggregated from 53 of the 55 licensing jurisdictions and excludes Hawaii and New Mexico. Anyone paid to prepare your return must hold a PTIN and must sign the return; credentialed preparers are listed in the IRS directory. Our directory lists accounting and CPA firms by state and city if you want to start locally.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources

17 links

• BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook: bookkeeping, accounting and auditing clerks
• BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook: accountants and auditors
• IRS: understanding tax return preparer credentials and qualifications
• IRS: enrolled agent information
• IRS: federal tax return preparer statistics
• IRS Directory of Federal Tax Return Preparers with Credentials and Select Qualifications
• North Carolina State Board of CPA Examiners: General Statute excerpts, G.S. 93-3 and 93-6
• New York State Education Department: Article 149, public accountancy
• AIPB: Certified Bookkeeper certification program
• NACPB: Certified Public Bookkeeper license
• NASBA: how many CPAs are there
• National Society of Accountants: 2020 to 2021 Income and Fees of Accountants and Tax Preparers in Public Practice, full study
• Merritt Bookkeeping pricing
• Pilot pricing
• Bookkeeper360 pricing
• Bench pricing
• 1-800Accountant pricing