What Drives the Price of Bookkeeping in Poland

Every Polish accounting office will quote you a monthly fee, and almost none of them will explain what moves it. That makes comparing two quotes close to impossible — which suits nobody, including the offices, because the cheap-looking quote usually turns into a series of extras and the client feels misled.

There is no single price for bookkeeping in Poland, for the same reason there is no single price for a building. What there is, is a short list of things that drive the work. If you know your own numbers on that list, any office can give you a real figure rather than a guess, and you can compare two of them honestly.

What actually drives the price

Document volume. The most important factor by far, and the one clients most often estimate wrongly. Count a real month: sales invoices, purchase invoices, bank transactions, cash documents. Not a good month or a quiet one — a normal one.

VAT status. A VAT-registered company files a structured JPK_V7 every month, which requires every document to be classified for VAT as well as for accounting. It is a materially different job from bookkeeping for a company outside the VAT system.

Full books or simplified. A limited company keeps full accounting books. A sole trader may keep a simplified revenue-and-expense ledger, or the lump-sum records, which are a fraction of the work. This is usually the single largest step in price between two businesses of similar size.

Payroll headcount. Almost always priced separately and per person, because each employee brings their own contracts, absences, filings and year-end forms.

Foreign transactions. Intra-Community supplies and acquisitions, imports, reverse charge, foreign currency and the exchange-rate differences that follow. A company buying software subscriptions from abroad has more VAT complexity than its size suggests.

Inventory and fixed assets. Stock movements and a depreciation register are ongoing work, not a one-off setup.

How your documents arrive. This is the factor clients can most easily change and most rarely think about. Documents that arrive continuously, legibly, with unusual items explained, cost less to process than the same documents delivered in one batch on the 18th with no context. Some offices price this difference explicitly; all of them feel it.

How quotes are structured, and why comparing them is hard

You will see three shapes:

• Per document, sometimes with a minimum. Transparent, scales with you, and variable month to month.
• A flat monthly fee within a document band. Predictable, until you outgrow the band — ask what happens then.
• A package bundling bookkeeping, payroll and some advisory. Simple, but only comparable to another package with the same contents.

Two offices can quote figures that look far apart and mean the same thing, or figures that look identical and do not. Before comparing, establish for each: which activities are included, what a correction costs, whether a mid-month question is billable, and who responds if the tax office writes.

What is almost never included

Ask specifically, because these are the usual sources of an unexpected invoice:

• Company formation and KRS change filings, which are one-off work.
• Representation before the tax office — a VAT verification, an inquiry, an audit.
• Annual financial statements, which are sometimes billed separately from the monthly fee.
• Corrections of periods handled by a previous office.
• Advisory — choosing a tax form, structuring a transaction, transfer-pricing documentation.

None of these are unreasonable to charge for. They are only unreasonable to discover.

The in-house comparison, which is the one you can calculate exactly

If you are weighing an office against hiring, the in-house side is computable and worth doing properly. Employer contributions add 20.48% on top of gross salary at the default accident rate — so a bookkeeper on 8,000 zł gross costs roughly 9,640 zł a month before software, training, and cover for holiday and sickness.

That figure, not the salary, is what belongs on the other side of the comparison. The employer cost calculator will produce it for any salary.

Getting a quote you can rely on

Send any office three things and you will get a real number instead of a range:

1. The document count from one normal month, broken down by type.
2. Your VAT status and whether you keep full or simplified books.
3. Headcount, and whether you have foreign transactions or inventory.

If an office quotes a firm price without asking for those, the price is provisional whether or not it says so.

We work with foreign-owned Polish companies in seven languages. Send a month’s documents and we will tell you what we see — what the volume actually is, where the friction is, and what it would take to run it properly.