Accounting Office or an In-House Bookkeeper? What Actually Pays

The question always arrives at the same moment: the company has grown enough that there are too many documents to handle in passing, and someone suggests hiring a bookkeeper. Usually one figure gets calculated — the salary — and set against the invoice from an accounting office.

That comparison is wrong, and wrong in both directions.

What an in-house bookkeeper actually costs

Gross salary is not the cost. On top of it come the employer’s contributions: pension 9.76%, disability 6.50%, accident 1.67% at the default rate, Labour Fund 1.00%, Solidarity Fund 1.45% and the Guaranteed Employee Benefits Fund 0.10%. Together, 20.48% on top of gross.

At a salary of 8,000 zł gross, the employer cost is roughly 9,640 zł a month. PPK comes on top of that for anyone who does not opt out.

And that is still not all of it:

• Accounting software and its updates.
• Training. The rules change every year, and 2026 brings structured e-invoicing and structured reporting — this is not the year to skip training a bookkeeper.
• Cover. Holiday, illness, notice periods. Tax deadlines do not wait, and one person is one point of failure.
• Liability. An accounting office carries compulsory professional indemnity insurance for bookkeeping services. An employee is liable within the limits the Labour Code sets, and towards the tax office it is the management board that answers.

The real annual cost of the role is therefore considerably more than twelve salaries.

When hiring genuinely pays

It is not about the size of the company. It is about how much work there is every day.

Hiring makes sense when:

• the document volume is such that the work is continuous rather than bunched around the 20th and the 25th;
• accounting is woven into operations — stock, production, project costing, debt collection — and an outsider would have to ask for context daily;
• the company runs its own systems that need to be worked in constantly;
• you need someone who also does things that are not bookkeeping: controlling, budgets, dealing with the bank.

An office makes sense when:

• the volume is predictable and fits a monthly cycle;
• you want continuity through holidays and illness;
• you want access to several specialisms — VAT, payroll, income tax — rather than to one person who has to know everything;
• you operate internationally and need to be served in more than one language;
• you would rather not personally carry the consequences of someone missing a change in the rules.

The option few people consider

The most common arrangement in growing companies is neither of the two: someone inside for document flow and for talking to people, an office for the bookkeeping and the liability.

Then there is a person in the company making sure invoices arrive on time, describing unusual events and holding the context — while the posting, the filings and the risk sit with the office. It costs less than a full bookkeeper’s post and it solves exactly the problem that usually starts the whole discussion: that documents arrive late and with no explanation.

What a price comparison does not show

An office’s price depends on your documents, not on a price list. Document count, VAT status, headcount, foreign transactions, currencies — those are what actually shape the work. A quote given without knowing them is a guess.

The cheapest quote usually assumes everything arrives perfectly. Worth asking what happens when it does not: what a correction costs, who answers a letter from the tax office, whether a question halfway through the month is included.

Changing an office is easier than dismissing an employee. It is the argument nobody makes, and it matters at the first decision.

How to work it out for yourself

Start with the cost of the post, because that is the only side you can calculate precisely: the employer cost calculator shows the full ladder for any salary, with every contribution the company pays.

Then count your documents. Not roughly — actually, from one typical month. That is the number that settles this decision, and it is the number you have to supply anyway to get a sensible quote from any office at all.

If you want both sides compared on your own data, send us a month’s documents and we will tell you plainly what we see.