A bookkeeper records what happened. An accountant tells you what it means and keeps you compliant. A CFO tells you what to do next. Sellers blur the titles, and founders end up paying CFO rates for data entry or asking a bookkeeper to make judgement calls nobody qualified them for.
What follows are the real boundaries, with indicative costs. Treat the figures as market shapes rather than quotes — they vary by city and complexity — but the ratios between them hold.
The bookkeeper: what happened
Transaction coding, bank reconciliation, invoicing, bills, payroll processing. The output is a clean, current ledger, and the work needs to happen weekly; bookkeeping done quarterly is a reconstruction rather than a record.
| Option | Typical cost | Watch for |
|---|---|---|
| In-house (part/full time) | A$65,000–85,000 + super for full time | Single point of failure; nobody reviews their work |
| Local freelance | A$40–80/hour | Hours expand with mess; availability varies |
| Outsourced service | Fixed monthly, scales with volume | Check a qualified reviewer actually looks at the file |
The error most businesses make here is under-buying: letting the books slip to save a few hundred dollars a month, then paying thousands for catch-up work and amended returns. A year of neglected bookkeeping reliably costs multiples of what the bookkeeping would have.
The accountant: what it means
Financial statements, the accrual adjustments that make them accurate, tax returns, compliance deadlines, and the ability to explain the numbers in plain language. The qualification — CA, CPA or ACCA — matters because recognition, accrual and tax-treatment decisions carry consequences, and an unqualified guess looks identical on the page until the tax office reads it.
Typical shapes: a compliance-only engagement (annual accounts and returns) runs roughly A$3,000–10,000 a year for a company this size; accountant hourly rates run A$150–400. The layer most 20-to- 100-person businesses are missing is monthly accountant-level review — someone qualified reading the close every month, not discovering a year of errors each June. That layer is exactly what turns the annual tax process from an expensive reconstruction into a formality, because the books were right all year.
The CFO: what should happen next
Budgets, forecasts, pricing, funding, runway, the financial case behind strategic decisions. Forward-looking work. A full-time CFO costs A$200,000–350,000 plus equity and is rarely justified below several hundred staff; the fractional market exists precisely for this, at roughly A$150–300 an hour or A$2,000–8,000 a month for a standing arrangement.
The one non-negotiable: CFO work is only as good as the ledger underneath it. A forecast built on unreconciled books is fiction with a spreadsheet.
The hiring order that works
- From the first sale: weekly bookkeeping. Non-negotiable at any size.
- From roughly A$500k revenue, or the first employee: accountant-level involvement — at minimum annually, ideally reviewing monthly. Payroll obligations make this the point where mistakes start carrying penalties.
- From roughly A$1–2m revenue: monthly management reporting with qualified review. This is where founders stop steering by bank balance.
- Episodically, from about A$2m: CFO input in bursts — an annual budget, a pricing review, a raise, a re-forecast when conditions move.
The three expensive mis-hires
The solo bookkeeper with no reviewer. Competent entry, nobody checking. Errors compound silently until tax time prices them.
The annual-only accountant. Appears each June/March to reconstruct a year from unreviewed records, bills accordingly, and every finding arrives ten months too late to act on.
The fractional CFO on messy books. Bills A$250 an hour, and spends the first engagement doing cleanup a bookkeeper should have done at a fifth of the rate. We've onboarded clients who spent A$30,000 on exactly this.
The layers interlock, which is the case for having them under one roof: the person building your forecast should trust the ledger because their own colleagues maintain it. However you source it, buy the layers in order. Skipping a layer does not remove its cost; it defers that cost and adds to it.