How much is the accounting / bookkeeping cost of your business?

No problem! Bench is worth every penny in my opinion. But if you have smaller expenses you can certainly do it yourself via Quickbooks.

I've never taken a bookkeeping course, but I do have a background in finance so accounting has always been relatively easy for me. So if you don't want to get into the weeds, then maybe hiring a bookkeeper and/or accountant may be better. But I'll tell you what I do.

First, unless you have a good reason otherwise, you should use cash accounting (not accrual accounting). Which means you can use bank account statements (you should definitely set up a separate bank account for your business) to keep track of revenue and expenses when they hit your bank account for a calendar year. I just export the financials from my banking website into Excel.

Revenue is just when revenue hits your bank account. For the most part expenses are just expenses. The main hiccup is that certain items are capital expenditures which normally need to be depreciated, but you can use special depreciation below a certain threshold to basically expense it in the first year. I also work from home so I use a home office deduction. All of this stuff is automatically generated by filling out questions/forms in TurboTax. Last, if you hire a contractor and pay more than $600, you need to also fill out a 1099 form. Again for me, all of this is done in TurboTax.

Here's the Schedule C:
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1040sc.pdf
For me, lines 1,3,5,7 are the same number (revenue), and my expenses are in lines 13 (which is entirely special depreciation of capex), 18, 23 (LLC fees), 25 (portion of utilities allocated to home office) and 30 (home office deduction). This may look complicated, but it's basically six numbers.

The CA 568 is even simpler because all they care about is revenue, so it's 2 numbers (revenue, and LLC fees). It looks complicated but TurboTax auto-fills everything out. I probably wouldn't do my own taxes if it weren't for the hand-holding that TurboTax does.

Here's the 568:
https://www.ftb.ca.gov/forms/2020/2020-568.pdf

I basically fill out 1 (revenue) and 3 (LLC fees) and check Yes for U (LLC is a disregarded entity, meaning that taxes are filed directly on my personal tax return in Schedule C). Everything else is "no" or auto-filled by TurboTax.

Again, I feel very comfortable doing all this myself, but I think it's perfectly normal and probably more common to pay a bookkeeper and accountant to handle this. For a bookkeeper and accountant, this is really common and simple stuff, so it shouldn't be too expensive. I've been doing this for years, so it only takes me a couple hours per year. But it probably took a lot longer in the beginning as I was learning how to do stuff. One approach you can also take is to hire a bookkeeper and accountant for the first year, see how it's done, and then do it yourself in following years if you feel comfortable doing so.

Hope this helps and good luck!

Awesome! More than happy to answer any q's that pop up 🙌 and chat live as well if that's helpful!