Published prices put outsourced bookkeeping for a small business with straightforward transactions at AED 500–2,500 a month, a tech-enabled firm doing a monthly close at AED 1,000–2,500 a month, complex or high-volume books at AED 5,000 or more a month, and an in-house bookkeeper's salary at AED 4,000–12,000 a month. Software you drive yourself starts at from AED 49 a month.
Chart data
| How the work is done | A month |
|---|---|
| Software you run yourself | from AED 49 |
| Outsourced, straightforward books | AED 500–2,500 |
| Tech-enabled firm, monthly close | AED 1,000–2,500 |
| Outsourced, complex or high volume | AED 5,000 or more |
| In-house bookkeeper on salary | AED 4,000–12,000 |
Price follows transactions, not turnover
Firms quote on volume. Take two Sharjah businesses, both billing AED 1.8 million a year. The consultancy raises eleven invoices a month, runs one bank account and pays six suppliers. The retailer settles card payments daily, holds stock, and has petty cash in two branches. The consultancy sits near AED 500 a month. The retailer will be quoted several times that, and the quote is not unfair.
So when you ask for a price, lead with the numbers that matter: bank lines a month, sales invoices a month, supplier bills a month, number of accounts, whether you hold stock. A firm that quotes without asking those is either guessing or planning to reprice later.
What you are actually buying
The output is not tidy files. It is the record set the FTA expects to see behind a return, described officially as transactions, assets, liabilities and ownership interests, kept for 7 years after the end of the period. A bookkeeper who reconciles monthly produces that as a by-product. One who touches the year in March produces a reconstruction, and reconstructions are what audits and reviews pick apart.
The in-house option is rarely about price
A full-time bookkeeper costs AED 4,000–12,000 a month in salary alone, before visa, end-of-service and the desk. Against outsourced pricing, the arithmetic only turns at genuine volume, or when you need someone in the building chasing collections and paying suppliers. Hiring for compliance alone, for a business under AED 3 million of revenue, is usually paying a premium for availability you will not use.
Software alone, and where it stops
Cloud plans from from AED 49 a month will produce a clean ledger if someone codes transactions correctly every month. The software does not decide whether a payment is an expense or a drawing, whether input tax is recoverable, or what belongs in an asset register. If you have the discipline and the basic accounting judgement, it is the cheapest route by a wide margin. If you do not, it produces a confident-looking set of numbers that are wrong, which is worse than a shoebox.
Where bookkeeping meets the tax bill
Corporate tax runs on taxable income, which starts from accounting profit. The quality of your bookkeeping is therefore the quality of your tax position. It also determines whether you can prove revenue stayed under AED 3,000,000 for Small Business Relief, a claim the FTA expects records to support.
One more cost to keep in view: where an audit is needed, published fees run to AED 15,000–40,000 a year, and auditors price disorganised books upward. Monthly reconciliation is the cheapest audit preparation there is.
A sensible default
For most owner-managed UAE businesses under AED 3 million of revenue: outsource the monthly bookkeeping at the lower end of the published range, insist on a monthly close rather than a quarterly scramble, and keep the corporate tax return with the same firm so nobody has to re-learn your accounts in September. Price the whole year in the compliance cost calculator.