How to REALISTICALLY Make $250,000/Year as a Bookkeeper

Want to realistically make $250,000 per year with your bookkeeping business?

In this video, I break down the exact strategy I used to build a bookkeeping business generating over $250,000 per year in just 3 years. No fake gurus. No unrealistic promises. Just a practical, focused approach that actually works.

I explain:
• How 40 bookkeeping clients at $500/month can create a $250K business
• Why focus and specialization are critical for growth
• The biggest limiting beliefs holding bookkeepers back
• Why moving quickly is one of the most important business skills
• How efficiency allows you to make more money while doing less
• The exact bookkeeping services I recommend focusing on
• Mistakes beginner bookkeepers make that slow down growth

If you're trying to start or grow a bookkeeping business in 2026, this video will help you create a realistic roadmap toward financial freedom and entrepreneurship.

Whether you are brand new to bookkeeping or already have clients, this video will help you think bigger, move faster, and build a more profitable business.

Subscribe for more videos about:
• Bookkeeping business growth
• Getting bookkeeping clients
• Entrepreneurship
• Accounting & finance
• Small business tips
• Building recurring monthly revenue

#Bookkeeping #BookkeepingBusiness #Entrepreneurship #SmallBusiness #Accounting #QuickBooks #BusinessGrowth


*Learn more about my investment fund targeting 8% to 12% fixed returns*
https://www.zipcapitalfund.com/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Realistic plan to make$250,000 per year in your bookkeeping business. Yesterday I was listening to a podcast by Alex Hormozy, and here's a quote that he said, and it really got me thinking when we are at the end of our lives, we won't be surrounded by the opponents we beat, but instead, we will be surrounded by the friends we helped. And he also went on to talk about this idea. A teacher should be evaluated simply on the success of his students. If you can't teach other people how to be better than you were, are you really a good teacher? That really got me thinking. I genuinely want to realistically teach you how to make$250,000 per year in your bookkeeping business. And I'm going to teach you because I did it. I did it in three years, and I think you can do it too. I started my bookkeeping business six years ago, and I built up to the point of 80 bookkeeping clients,$40,000 of monthly recurring revenue. And I'm just going to talk through some tips and some pointers to hopefully realistically help you get to$250,000. Here's what it looks like practically:$500 per month, which is$6,000 per year. That is on average how big each of my bookkeeping clients were. So that's about 40 clients. And realistically, my business doubled every year. So it took me three years to get to 40 clients because I had 10 clients at the end of my first year, 20 clients at the end of my second year, 40 clients at the end of my third year. And I made, I think, more than$300,000 in my third year in my bookkeeping business. I did it and I'm not special. You can absolutely do exactly what I did, and hopefully you can do it faster because you're watching these videos, and hopefully you learn how to avoid the mistakes that I made and fast track to success. I want to spend a long time talking about accounts payable and accounts receivable management. So I typically teach bookkeeping services, record transactions, reconcile accounts, generate financial reports, which I think that's absolutely what you should be doing. But there's also another thing that you can do accounts payable and accounts receivable management. So this does get a little bit more complicated. It is going above and beyond your traditional simple bookkeeping services. But here's the thing this will enable you to do two things, accomplish two things at once. One, you're gonna make more money. And two, you're going to be able to service bigger clients because somebody who needs help sending out invoices or paying bills probably has a bigger business. I was able to onboard seven or eight of these high-ticket clients, and they were all paying me more than$1,000. One paid me$2,600, and I actually still have that bookkeeping client today. I pay their bills every Thursday. It's about 30 to 40 bills that I pay every Thursday. And then I had another client paying me$2,000 per month, another client$1,500 per month, a smaller one,$900 per month, and then several other bookkeeping clients paying me more than$1,000 per month. You stack four or five, six of those clients, all of a sudden, you're replacing your old job. All of a sudden, you're replacing your full-time salary just with five or six bookkeeping clients at$1,500 per month. What does it look like practically? What does it look like realistically? Accounts payable. Let's start with accounts payable. So you are literally paying bills for your customers. So here's what it looks like my customers will send me bills that need to be paid. You can do it multiple different ways. They might email them to you, or maybe you have a whole separate email address just for that company, and they just send you all of the invoices throughout the week that need to be paid. You log in once a week, download all the invoices, put them into QuickBooks and pay them. Or maybe there's a Google Drive. This is my preferred method. Have a Google Drive or Dropbox or some sort of shared folder, and you need two folders: invoices waiting to be approved, invoices approved for payment, invoices waiting to be approved. I don't look at it, I don't care about it, I don't check it because oftentimes there are invoices in there that are not ready, or maybe the work is not complete, or maybe the invoices need to be renegotiated because they're too high, or maybe many different reasons. So invoices waiting to be approved, I'm not concerned with that. I do not look at that folder. I only concern myself with invoices approved for payment. Here's the trigger every Thursday at 11 a.m., my client emails me, hey Zach, invoices are ready to go. Invoices are approved for payment. I receive that email every Thursday, 11 a.m. I go to Google, Google Drive, and I open up that folder. And there I have 30 PDF invoices. I download all 30 PDF invoices, open up QuickBooks, I start entering the bills into QuickBooks one at a time. I take the information from the PDF, I enter it into QuickBooks. Now I've got 30 bills in QuickBooks that need to be paid. And so then I go to their bank account. So I have access to their bank account. I have my own username, my own password. I have my services set up, my account management set up in such a way that I can approve payments to be paid. So I will log into their bank account. I will enter in all of the bills, and then I will draft the payment. And then here, 30 bills get entered into their online cash management, treasury management, bill pay account, entered into the bills, and then I draft them for payment, and then somebody on their team reviews and approves the bills to be paid directly through the bank. Now this takes a few steps to get to this point. Every time there's a new vendor, a new contractor, we need to request their banking information. So that's up to the client. If they onboard a new subcontractor, they get their banking information, their account number, name of their business, and their routing number, and probably their W9 all at the same time. They send it over to me. I entered into QuickBooks, I entered their account number and routing number into their bank system so that I can pay the bills on a weekly basis. And then once the bills are paid, go back into QuickBooks, mark the bills as paid, and then go back to QuickBooks the following day and match the bank transaction to the manual bill payment in QuickBooks. So 30 bills per week, probably 120 bills per month, comes out to be about$600 per month that I'm charging. So I'm charging about$5 per month on average per bill, per accounts payable that needs to be paid. So if you're quoting somebody, look back the past three months, see how many bills or invoices they had to be paid, average it out per month, multiply it by$5, maybe$6, maybe$8. Use your best judgment. But you're probably looking at least$100. If they only have a couple bills to be paid, I'm charging at least$100. And if they have$30,$40,$50 bills, you're looking at two, three, four, five hundred dollars per month that you can add on in addition to already your$1,000 per month bookkeeping fee. So that's accounts payable. Now accounts receivable, very similar process, but I actually charge$10 per accounts receivable per month. Now, same concept. Client emails me, hey Zach, please send out an invoice to XYZ client. Here is the name of the company, the date of the invoice, the terms due on receipt, net 10, net 15, net 30. Here's a description for the service. Here's the amount. Go ahead, here's the email address for the client. You can go ahead and send the invoice directly through QuickBooks. And so I charge$10 on average per invoice that needs to be sent out. So typically$100,$200,$300 extra. It's just a nice little bump, a nice little boost, especially whenever you're just getting started. If you can get four or five of these big ticket clients, it can really help you scale quickly and get up to that$6,000 per year per client. You can get way past that. You can start charging$12,000,$15,000,$20,000 per year per client once you start adding on some of these additional services. Now, the only caveat I'm gonna say is that these services are time sensitive. So I don't love them long term. Right now, where I am, six years into it, I'm not a huge fan of accounts payable and accounts receivable management, but that's because I'm doing all the work now and I'm moving on to zip capital and I'm doing other things. So I'm not a huge fan of it now, but I am absolutely happy doing it for the first three years because it helped explode my growth and just helped me make a ton of money early on in my bookkeeping business journey. Okay, now let's talk about limiting beliefs. I never thought this was possible. I'm totally switching gears here. I'm done talking about accounts payable, done talking about accounts receivable. I never thought this was possible until it happened. And that's why I'm here to help you fast track to success. I'm making these videos so that I can open up your mind and make you believe that it's possible. Because honestly, I thought I just want if I could, if I could ever get to$10,000, I would be happy. I never thought that would happen. Whenever I was starting my bookkeeping business, I thought maybe I'll make$80,000 a year. And you know what? I'll be an entrepreneur, I'll be working for myself, working from home, making my own schedule. I'll I'll like the work that I'm doing, I'll be happy.$80,000,$90,000 a year. The second year of my business, I made, I don't even know, more than$100,000 in the second year of my business. And so destroy those limiting beliefs. Believe that it's possible because it absolutely is. I'm not I'm not some Wall Street genius. I'm not some tech guru in Silicon Valley. I didn't start some incredible business. I'm just a regular person, just like you, just like everybody else watching this video. So destroy those limiting beliefs. It is possible. You can absolutely make$250,000 a year just in your bookkeeping business, but it's going to require focus. You're about to make$125 per hour. That's what it is.$250,000 per year ends up being$125 per hour. Anything that gets in your way needs to be eliminated. If it is, if it is prohibiting you from legitimately making$125 in the next hour, it's a waste of time. So here's a few examples. Unnecessary coffee meetups. I love networking. Business is all about relationships, but you got to be smart. You got to be strategic. You can't just go grab coffee every single day with every salesperson, insurance agent, real estate agent, every financial advisor, every new up-and-coming business owner. You don't have time. You got to be strategic with your in-person networking events. Your old job, you got to decide when am I going to quit that old job so I can focus on making$250,000 per year in my bookkeeping business. If you're making less than$125 per hour in your old job, it's taking away from your ability to grow your bookkeeping business. Scrolling social media. Now, I talk a lot about organic social media marketing. It can be a very slippery slope whenever you're creating content or engaging with your followers. Are you really just doom scrolling on social media? You got to cut that out. You're sitting in your home office. You might be in your kitchen, in your basement, in your bedroom, in your living room, sitting on your couch, trying to run your bookkeeping business. Nobody's holding you accountable. There's no boss, there's no manager, there's no coworkers, there's no, there's no daily meeting, there's no coworkers and associates walking around you, walking past your cubicle, holding you accountable. If you are starting your own business, if you are an entrepreneur, you have to hold yourself accountable. You have to have the discipline to stay focused every day, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., maybe even earlier, maybe even later, maybe even on the weekends. Don't get caught wasting time watching TV, playing video games, scrolling on social media, or starting another business. Hello, I did this, I made this mistake. One year into starting my bookkeeping business, I thought it would be a good idea to start a trucking company. Spoiler alert, it was not a good idea to start a second company whenever I was only one year into my first company. Don't fall for it. You gotta stay focused. Don't do anything else. Just work on your bookkeeping business. Save up money so that you can quit your old job. Avoid distractions during the day. Be strategic with your time. Guard your precious time like it is the most valuable thing because it is. You can always buy everything else, but you cannot buy more time. Everybody only has the same 24 hours in the day. And then also don't do too much in your current bookkeeping business. So definitely don't start another business, but also don't do too much in your current business. I like to keep things simple. Start by categorizing transactions and reconciling accounts and generating financial reports in QuickBooks Online. And then maybe you can start doing accounts payable and accounts receivable management. But everything that I do is in QuickBooks Online. I'm not doing too much with other software: App Folio, Building, Job Tread, QuickBooks Desktop, Zero, Sage. All great software, but not my specialty. I only do QuickBooks Online payroll, sales tax, tax consulting, tax strategy, controller CFO, fractional CFO, budgeting, forecasting, all great, all very important. But that's not me. That's not what I do. So it doesn't matter what you do. It just matters that you focus on something. There, there are literally entire companies that just do payroll. ADP, one of the one of the a very large company in the United States, ADP, what do they do? Only do payroll. So you can absolutely get big just doing bookkeeping. Don't think that you need to offer more services to make more money. I would actually argue it's the opposite. You need to offer fewer services so that you can become an expert, so that you can be more efficient and do more in less time and make more money. The busier and bigger that I got, the less that I was doing. That way I became more streamlined and I more and I became more focused. The less I was willing, the bigger I got, the less I was willing to do those miscellaneous tasks that I was talking about. Sales tax, payroll filing, all those miscellaneous tasks are just tasks, are just going to take away from your ability to be super efficient at bookkeeping. You're gonna try to manage 40 bookkeeping clients. That's eight clients every single day. That's at least 30 minutes every day. That's per client. So that's at least four hours every day of just routine bookkeeping. So you're going to be very busy doing the routine bookkeeping for 40 clients and keeping up with all the sales and marketing and administrative tasks that go into running a business. So the bigger and busier that I got, the less that I was doing. It's kind of a difficult concept, I think, for new entrepreneurs to wrap their head around. But seriously, as I grew, I started doing less different tasks. And I only focused on bookkeeping. I only focused on QuickBooks. You need to move quickly, you need to fail quickly, rebound quickly, and move forward quickly. You can't spend two days making every decision. If you can make that same decision in two hours versus two days, what would that look like compounded on itself over one year? Think about it. If you can make one decision every two hours, you are literally going to make 10 decisions in two days versus somebody else who's only making one decision in two days. Imagine if you can make 10 times more decisions, faster decisions than somebody else. How much further could you move? How much more could you accomplish? You have to be willing to make mistakes, you have to be willing to fail quickly, but then importantly, you got to move forward, you got to rebound quickly. You're gonna make mistakes. That's part of the learning process. And also keep in keep in mind in the beginning, it's mostly simple stuff. In the beginning, you don't have too many clients. In the beginning, nobody knows who you are. In the beginning, nobody's seen your social media marketing content anyway. So if you mess up with a client, if you mess up on social media, if you mess up some little simple task in the beginning, who cares? It's not that big of a deal. It is important, but in the grand scheme of things, it's gonna be okay. Here, here is my golden rule. You're going to make mistakes. As a matter of fact, I want to make mistakes. It's the best way to learn. I want to try new things. I want to fail. I want to rebound quickly, make mistakes, and learn from my mistakes. That is the golden rule. That's what I want to leave you with here today. Move quickly, be decisive, make decisions quickly, make mistakes, but then learn from your mistakes and never make the same mistake twice. Always try to do the right thing, always have integrity, be ethical, be honest, be transparent, of course. Always try to do the right thing, but don't be afraid to make mistakes. If if you if you go through life, if you go through this business, never making a mistake, I have I have a news flash for you. It means you're not thinking big enough, you're not trying hard enough, you're not doing enough because you're not willing to fail. You gotta be willing to fail, make the mistakes, learn from those mistakes, and then never make the same mistake twice. Last thing I'm gonna say, I have an investment fund, Zip Capital, where I'm targeting 8% up to 12% fixed returns to accredited investors. It's not guaranteed, it's a private investment. Of course, there's risk associated with it, but I recommend check out my website down below, zipcapitalfund.com. We can schedule a meeting. If you want to chat about you possibly investing, you got to be an accredited investor. The minimum to invest is$25,000, but I'm targeting 8% up to 12% fixed returns. And in my fund already, I have six million dollars raised of other people's money. So if you're interested in learning more about investing in zip capital, check out the link in the description of the video. If you haven't already, subscribe to my channel because I'm putting out new videos every week teaching you how to start and grow your business. Like the video, comment the video. It's all good stuff. Appreciate you watching. See you all next week.