LOOKING FOR A 1-800ACCOUNTANT ALTERNATIVE?

Three published plans, and every one of them is billed annually. That asterisk sits under all three prices on their pricing page, so treat the monthly figure as a way of quoting an annual number.

Tax Advisory is $209 a month, which works out to $2,508 for the year. You get portal access, a dedicated accountant, year-round tax advice, proactive tax planning, quarterly reviews, and financial planning. What you don't get is a return filed or a bookkeeper. It's advice, not production work.

Starter is $299 a month, or $3,588 for the year, and it's the plan they mark as most popular. It adds filing of your annual income tax return for one entity, a Schedule C, 1065, 1120, or 1120-S, federal and state. It also includes a ClientBooks bookkeeping software subscription, expert review before filing, quarterly reviews, an annual tax plan, and a customized engagement plan. Their page notes that AI automates about 25% of the return. The bookkeeping here is software access, not a bookkeeper.

Business Complete is $469 a month, or $5,628 for the year. It's everything in Starter plus full-service bookkeeping with a dedicated bookkeeper starting at 75 monthly transactions, payroll set up and handled for you as the owner, and quarterly estimated taxes calculated and tracked. This is the only plan where a person is doing your books.

One naming quirk first, so you don't think you're looking at a different offer. The pricing page calls the middle tier Starter, while the bookkeeping and payroll service pages show a package called Core Accounting at the same $299. Same price, two names.

Then there's a long list of add-ons with no published prices: entity formation, EIN, registered agent, business tax preparation, back tax preparation, Form 1099 prep, and audit defense. Amended returns, quarterly taxes, sales and use tax, monthly and catch-up bookkeeping, payroll support and filing, W-2 and 1099 prep, and multi-state payroll sit on the same list.

Their FAQ says pricing depends on the services you need and the complexity of your situation, and that your consultant provides the quote. So the three published prices are a floor, not a ceiling.

On trust signals, their site displays BBB accreditation and a SOC 2 Type 1 attestation from Prescient Assurance. They're a real firm with real infrastructure at 260 Madison Avenue in New York, serving clients across the country remotely, Monday to Friday, 9 AM to 6 PM Eastern.

We'd rather tell you where they win than pretend they don't.

One bill covers the return. If you're an owner who mostly wants the tax problem to go away, having filing, planning, and books under one roof at a fixed annual price is genuinely simpler than assembling a bookkeeper and a CPA yourself. Nobody gets to point at the other guy in March.

Year-round tax advice at a low entry price. Tax Advisory at $209 a month is cheaper than what most CPA firms charge for planning conversations, and quarterly reviews with proactive planning is a real service, not a brochure line. If your books are already fine and what you're missing is somebody to talk strategy with before December, that plan makes sense on its own.

Quarterly estimated taxes calculated and tracked. That's on Business Complete, and it's the piece owners forget until they're penalized. The IRS generally expects sole proprietors and partners to pay estimated tax when they expect to owe $1,000 or more for the year (see irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/estimated-taxes). Having someone run that number four times a year has value.

Scale and structure. Over 100,000 businesses served, a client portal, a support line, and a SOC 2 attestation mean there's a process behind the person you talk to. If your bookkeeper gets sick, somebody else picks it up. A one-person local firm can't say that as cleanly, and we won't pretend otherwise.

Entity formation and startup help. If you haven't formed yet, they'll do the LLC or corporation filing, the EIN, and the registered agent as part of the same relationship. We don't offer any of that.

Annual prepay isn't a problem by itself. It just means the questions have to get asked before the money moves, not after. These come straight from their published terms of service, and we'd ask the same of any firm quoting an annual number, including a local one.

What happens if it isn't working in month four? Their terms say annual, bi-annual, and one-time initial fees are up to 90% refundable only within 30 days of the initial purchase date, less services rendered, and non-refundable after those 30 days. Their terms also say cancellations are accepted in writing only, then list an email address, a phone line, and a mailing address as the ways to send that notice. Ask which one they'll actually honor and get the confirmation back in writing. Cancellation takes effect as of the next monthly billing cycle, so read the whole thing as a 30-day window to change your mind.

What does it renew at? The terms say services renew automatically at then-current rates, and that the subscription fee can change at their discretion on notice. Ask for the renewal number in writing at signup instead of finding it on a statement.

What does my transaction volume actually cost? Bookkeeping on Business Complete starts at 75 monthly transactions. If you run 200, ask what tier that puts you in and what the annual figure becomes. This is the single most common gap between a quoted price and a real one.

Where do your books live, and can you take them? ClientBooks is their platform. If your books are kept there rather than in a QuickBooks Online account you own, ask what you receive on cancellation and in what format. If you'd rather stay in QuickBooks Online, ask for that in writing too, since their site says bookkeepers work in it. This is the question we'd put at the top of the list.

Who handles PA sales tax, and at what price? Sales and use tax is an add-on with no listed rate. If you sell taxable goods or materials in Pennsylvania, get that quoted before you commit, not after.

One small thing to raise with whoever files your 1099s, at any firm. Their Form 1099 add-on describes the old $600 reporting trigger. The IRS raised the general information-return threshold to $2,000 for tax years beginning after 2025, with inflation adjustments starting in 2027, and Form 1099-NEC is still due January 31 (Instructions for Forms 1099-MISC and 1099-NEC, irs.gov/instructions/i1099mec). Marketing copy lags the code all the time. It's worth a question, not an alarm.

Their terms also include an individual arbitration clause and a class action waiver. Standard for a firm this size, and worth knowing you agreed to it.

We're narrower on purpose. We don't file returns, we don't form entities, and we don't do audit defense. We do books, payroll, and the Pennsylvania tax layers that sit around them, and we do them for a set of businesses we actually know.

Our plans are $399 a month for Essentials, $599 for Growth, which adds accounts payable and receivable tracking, strategy calls, and cash flow forecasting, and $1,199 for Scale, which covers multi-entity and full bill pay. All three are on our pricing page. No setup fee, no annual prepay, cancel any time, and a 100% satisfaction guarantee on your first month. If month one doesn't earn it, you don't pay for it.

Payroll is a $99-a-month add-on that includes direct deposits, federal and state withholdings, quarterly 941 filings, and W-2 and 1099 prep. It also covers PA local earned income tax and the local services tax, which is the part national firms tend to leave off the page. The collector changes by municipality here. If you have a foreman in Cranberry Township, an apprentice in Ross, and an office in the city, that's three sets of rules on one payroll run.

Your books stay in your own QuickBooks Online account, under your login, on every plan. We're added as your accountant user. There's nothing to request on the way out because you already own the file, which is the same setup we use for people leaving Bench and Pilot.

And you get one person. No portal ticket, no rotation, no waiting on a report drop. You text or email Jordan, who spent seven years in corporate accounting and finance before building this firm, and you get an answer the same business day, usually within a few hours. That's the whole trade: less breadth, more of a person who knows your job numbers by name.

Take a landscaping and hardscaping contractor in Butler County. Around $780,000 a year in revenue, so roughly $65,000 a month. Four employees on payroll, an S-Corp, two bank accounts, a materials account, a fuel card, and about 190 transactions in a busy month. They collect PA sales tax on materials. Here's year one on each path.

1-800Accountant Business Complete, year one:

Plan: $469 x 12 = $5,628, billed annually, so it's one charge up front.

What that covers: bookkeeping with a dedicated bookkeeper starting at 75 monthly transactions, payroll set up and handled for the owner, quarterly estimated taxes calculated and tracked, the annual return for one entity federal and state, tax advisory, quarterly reviews, and the ClientBooks subscription.

Not priced on the page: the tier above 75 monthly transactions (this contractor runs about 190), PA sales tax filing, payroll for four employees beyond the owner, and any catch-up work. Every one of those is a quote-based add-on, so the number here is $5,628 plus four unknowns.

Peacock, year one:

Bookkeeping, Essentials: $399 x 12 = $4,788

Payroll add-on: $99 x 12 = $1,188

QuickBooks Online Plus, in your name, for job costing and classes: $140 x 12 = $1,680 (list price on quickbooks.intuit.com, September 7, 2026)

Year-one total: $7,656 if your books are current when we start. If they're not, catch-up is a flat quote after a free look, from $400 for 1 to 3 months behind.

Not included: your tax return. We keep the books tax-ready and hand them to your CPA, and that return is a separate bill you'd need to add on our side.

Now the gap. On service fees alone, ours is $5,976 against their $5,628, a difference of $348 for the year, or $29 a month. Add the QuickBooks subscription you'd own and we're $2,028 higher, and their number still includes a return that ours doesn't. If all you need is books, payroll for one owner, and a filed return, 1-800Accountant is the cheaper package and we'll say so.

What flips it is volume and Pennsylvania. Bookkeeping for 190 transactions a month isn't the 75-transaction starting price, payroll for four employees isn't the owner-only payroll in the plan, and PA sales tax is an add-on either way. Get all three quoted before you compare, because that's the number that belongs next to our $7,656. And there's a number that never makes it onto either side of this table: what your accountant charges to fix a bad year at filing time. Clean monthly books cut that bill for our clients by roughly a third to a half, and it shows up in March, not on a pricing page.

If you're searching "1800accountant review," here's what we found when we went looking on September 7, 2026. We read the 2026 write-ups on comparison sites and the recurring threads on r/smallbusiness and r/tax where owners ask about them by name. We deliberately didn't total up star ratings. Those numbers shift week to week across Trustpilot, Google, and the BBB, and anything we printed here would be stale before you read it. What follows is the shape of the feedback, not a score.

The good reviews are consistent about one thing: individual people. Their site features a Trustpilot review from a first-time owner praising a specific advisor by name, and that's genuinely representative of the positive feedback we found. Owners who get a strong, responsive accountant tend to stay for years and say so.

The complaints cluster in three places. Price that lands higher than the advertised plan once volume, payroll, and filings are added. The annual prepay meeting a 30-day refund window, which is where most of the frustration in public threads comes from. And turnover, where a new preparer or bookkeeper means starting the explanation of your business over.

Read it the way you'd read reviews of any firm serving six figures of clients: the ceiling is high and the floor depends on which person you're assigned. That risk is real at a national firm, and it's a different risk than a one-person local firm, which has no bench at all. Neither is free.

Pick 1-800Accountant if you want filing, planning, and books on one invoice at a fixed annual price, your transaction volume is genuinely modest, and you'd rather have one national firm than two local relationships. Same answer if you're forming the business right now and want the LLC, EIN, and registered agent handled in the same conversation. That's a clean, defensible choice and we'd tell you so on the phone.

Pick a local bookkeeper if you're a contractor or trade with job costing, retainage, materials versus labor sales tax, subs to 1099, and a workers' comp audit that wants clean payroll records. None of that appears on a national pricing page. It's most of our week.

Same answer if you run a practice. Medical, dental, veterinary, and therapy offices have insurance reimbursements landing weeks late, patient refunds, equipment loans, and a payroll that's the biggest line on the P&L. Owner-only payroll doesn't cover a staff of nine.

Same answer for professional services with partner draws, PA local earned income tax withheld to the right collector, and a CPA who needs to call the bookkeeper directly in March and get a human. Firms in Wexford, Sewickley, and the city all deal with different collectors, and getting that wrong is the kind of small mistake that generates letters.

And same answer if you're behind. Catch-up is where a fixed annual bundle gets uncomfortable, because backlog is a project, not a subscription. We quote it flat after a free look, from $400 for 1 to 3 months behind, and we tell you the number before we start.

Start with a free call where we look at what you actually have. Before you cancel anything, ask them for a full export: general ledger, trial balance, bank reconciliation reports, and the chart of accounts, plus a QuickBooks-compatible file if your books were kept in ClientBooks. Ask in writing, and ask before the cancellation goes in.

Watch the calendar too. Their terms accept cancellations in writing only and make them effective as of the next monthly billing cycle, and the 30-day refund window on annual fees is measured from your initial purchase date. Knowing where you sit in that cycle changes when you should send the notice.

If your books already live in a QuickBooks Online account you control, we get added as your accountant user and pick up from the last clean month. If they don't, we set up a QuickBooks Online account in your name and bring the history in. Either way, the file is yours from day one.

Most people arriving from a national firm have a few unreconciled months around the handoff, and that's normal. We look at it, quote catch-up as a flat one-time project, and get you current. After that it's clean books every month and one person to call.