Bookkeeping packages in Dubai run from roughly AED 1,500 a month at the entry tier to AED 10,000 and above for a business with several entities and daily reporting. Most SMEs land between AED 3,000 and 6,000. Those are reported market bands, not our rate card. Almost every firm prices the same way: a monthly fee attached to a transaction cap, with everything above the cap billed as an extra.
That cap is the whole story. A package is a unit of manual work, and the unit is a document somebody has to read, classify and record. Cut how many documents your business creates by hand, and you buy a smaller package for the same revenue.
This page is about how the packages themselves are built and where the quote quietly grows after you sign. Choosing between a freelance bookkeeper and a firm is a separate question, covered elsewhere on this blog.
One boundary first. slgo builds the plumbing: the systems that create the invoice, take the payment, and push both into a CRM and accounting software without a person retyping anything. We are not an accounting firm, and we do not sell Xero, Zoho Books or QuickBooks. We connect them to everything upstream.
What a bookkeeping package actually buys you in the UAE
A bookkeeping package in the UAE is a fixed monthly fee covering the recording of a defined volume of transactions: sales invoices raised, supplier bills entered, expenses categorised, bank lines matched, and a set of month-end reports delivered on a schedule. It buys a recording service with a ceiling, not unlimited access to an accountant.
What sits inside varies far less than the price does. Across the firms advertising to Dubai SMEs, the standard scope is bank reconciliation, accounts payable and receivable entry, expense categorisation, a general ledger kept current, and a monthly pack containing profit and loss, balance sheet, and usually an ageing report for unpaid invoices. The differences between one firm's mid tier and another's are mostly the transaction ceiling, the number of bank accounts covered, and how fast the month-end pack lands.
Before you compare two quotes, get both firms to write down what they count as one transaction. That single definition moves the effective price more than the headline fee.
Bookkeeping versus accounting: the line buyers keep crossing
Bookkeeping is the recording layer. Accounting is the judgment layer on top: statements prepared for a bank or an investor, statutory filings, advisory on what the numbers mean for hiring or pricing. Filings and anything with a legal consequence belong to a licensed accountant or auditor, and nothing on this page replaces that conversation.
The reason the line matters for your budget: recording automates well and judgment does not. When a firm bundles both into one monthly number, you pay professional rates for transcription. Ask any proposal to split the fee into recording work and judgment work. If recording is 70 percent of the retainer, that 70 percent is the part a system can take over while the firm keeps the part that needs a human brain.
I have never seen a firm refuse to split that line when asked directly. Ask in the first call, in writing.
How bookkeeping packages are priced: transactions, not revenue
Firms price on entry count because entry count is what costs them staff hours. Two businesses with identical revenue can sit three tiers apart. A consultancy billing AED 400,000 a year across eight invoices has perhaps 60 bank lines a month. An e-commerce store with the same revenue across 900 small orders creates a different job entirely, and the bookkeeper's hours follow the orders, not the money.
Complexity adds a second layer on top of volume. Trading, contracting and manufacturing businesses carry inventory movements, partial deliveries and retentions, and firms typically price that 20 to 30 percent above a service business at the same transaction count. Multi-currency does the same thing, because every foreign card charge needs a rate applied on the date it cleared.
Here is the arithmetic that sets your tier. Take a service business doing 90 sales a month. That produces roughly 90 quotes, 90 invoices, around 95 payment records once you count partials, and a dozen refunds or corrections. Call it 290 documents. At 90 seconds of human handling each, that is 7.25 hours of pure transcription before anyone looks at a report. The package you are quoted is that number of hours plus margin.
Count your own documents for one month before you take a single call. The number you produce is the number you are negotiating against.
What bookkeeping packages include at each tier
The three-tier shape is close to universal in Dubai. The labels change, the substance does not.
Entry tier, roughly AED 1,500 to 3,000 a month. Usually capped around 50 to 100 transactions, one bank account, quarterly or monthly bank reconciliation, sales and purchase entry, and a basic profit and loss statement. Fits a sole establishment, a consultant, or a young company with few suppliers. Reporting is often a spreadsheet export rather than a formatted pack.
Standard tier, roughly AED 3,000 to 6,000 a month. Caps commonly sit between 150 and 300 transactions, two or three bank accounts, monthly reconciliation, full accounts payable and receivable, expense categorisation with receipt storage, a named account manager, and a monthly management pack with profit and loss, balance sheet and debtor ageing. This is where most clinics, salons, agencies and small retailers sit.
Upper tier, roughly AED 6,000 to 10,000 and above. Higher or uncapped volume, multiple entities or branches, multi-currency, inventory, payroll support, cash-flow forecasting, and often a monthly review call. At the top of this band you are buying part-time finance function, not bookkeeping.
Read the tier you are being sold against the list above and mark the lines that are missing. The missing ones are the add-ons you will pay for in month three.
Transaction limits and the upgrade triggers nobody mentions on the call
Packages break in predictable places. Every one of these is a conversation worth having before you sign, not after.
- The cap is defined loosely. Ask whether one transaction means one bank line, one invoice, or one document. A month with 40 bank lines, 40 sales invoices and 20 receipts is either 40 or 100 transactions depending on whose definition wins. Get it in the engagement letter.
- Excess entries are billed per item. Firms commonly charge a few dirhams to low double digits per transaction above the cap. Do the maths before you assume the cheap tier is cheap: a AED 2,500 package capped at 100, in a month where you actually ran 260 transactions, at AED 8 per excess entry, costs AED 3,780. That is more than the standard tier you skipped.
- Seasonal spikes hit the annual fee, not one month. Retail in the Dubai Shopping Festival window, a clinic after a campaign, a studio in peak season. One heavy quarter can push the annual average over the cap, and firms reprice on the average.
- Extra accounts get priced separately. A second bank account, a corporate card, a payment gateway settling to you every two days, and a cash float are four reconciliation streams, not one.
- Backlog is never included. If you arrive with six months unrecorded, expect that cleanup quoted as a one-off on top of the retainer, priced on the same transaction logic.
- Payroll usually sits outside the package. WPS files and payslips are typically billed per employee per month as an add-on.
Ask for the excess rate in writing and model your busiest month at that rate. The tier that wins on the average often loses on the peak.
The software is usually not in the fee
Most quotes exclude the subscription. You pay it, in your own name, and you should: your books should not live inside a vendor's account.
As of September 2026, Zoho Books publishes a free plan for micro businesses, a Standard plan in the region of AED 50 to 60 per organisation per month, mid plans running roughly AED 150 to 250, and a top tier near AED 880, with extra users around AED 10 each per month. Xero and QuickBooks sit in a similar shape for the plans most SMEs buy. Vendors change plans and prices, so check the current page before you budget.
The thing worth checking before you pick is bank feed coverage for your specific account. Zoho Books lists direct feeds for accounts at Emirates NBD, ADCB, FAB, Mashreq and DIB. QuickBooks lists a similar set including RAKBANK. Xero carries direct UAE feeds including Wio. Coverage changes, and it depends on the account type, so confirm with the vendor for the exact account you hold.
Corporate credit cards frequently have no feed at all, so card spend arrives as a statement PDF someone types in, and that gap survives every integration I have set up. A payment gateway does not settle transaction by transaction either: it drops a net batch into your account every day or two, minus fees, and somebody has to split that lump back into individual paid invoices. That split is the single most reliable source of manual hours in a UAE service business, and no bookkeeping tier removes it. A mapped gateway feed does.
Pick the software your future bookkeeper already works in, then wire your sales and payment systems to feed it.
Sizing guide: count documents before you shop
Take last month and count four things: sales documents issued, supplier bills received, bank and card lines across every account, and expense receipts. Add them. That total, not your revenue, places you.
Under roughly 100 combined and a single bank account, the entry tier is honest. A consultant, a coach, a small B2B service company usually lives here.
Between 150 and 400, with two or three accounts and a gateway, you need the standard tier and you should confirm the cap covers your December, not your August. Clinics, salons, agencies, studios and small trading companies cluster here.
Above 500, or with inventory, several entities, or foreign-currency purchases, you are in upper-tier territory. At that volume the real decision stops being which package and becomes how much of the input you can stop producing by hand.
If your count sits within 20 percent of a cap, you are already in the upgrade zone. Price the next tier now.
Cutting the input, not the fee
Every quote you receive is priced on manual documents. So the cheapest move is not haggling over the retainer, it is reducing what arrives on the bookkeeper's desk.
What that looks like in practice on our own business. Our studio takes bookings in WhatsApp. The agent quotes, issues the invoice, sends a payment link in the same chat, and the paid or unpaid status writes itself into the CRM against that deal. Nobody retypes a booking into accounting software afterwards, because the transaction was born recorded. The same contour runs the studio at AED 67,600 net in a month at roughly 5x ROAS, and the finance side of it costs no extra staff hours as volume climbs. If you want the mechanics of the payment half, we wrote it up in detail in our guide to sending payment links inside WhatsApp.
Most of the cost in a Dubai SME traces back to sales documents, payments and expenses, and each one has a wire that removes it. The invoice should fire from the system that closed the sale, numbered and stored, rather than being written later from a chat thread. Gateway settlement should map back to invoice level automatically instead of arriving as an unexplained net deposit. Receipts should get captured at the moment of spend, with the card feed doing the rest.
We price that work openly. One process on autopilot is from AED 6,000 to set up and AED 1,200 a month to keep running, connecting whatever you already use rather than replacing it. For context on what it displaces, across the SMEs we audit, roughly AED 2,000 a month of salary is spent on copying data between systems that should be talking to each other, and about AED 4,100 a month leaks from leads answered too slowly by the same overloaded people.
None of this replaces the accountant, and that is the point. Judgment stays human. Transcription should not be.
If you want to see exactly where your own records are being created by hand, the growth audit traces one live transaction from enquiry to invoice to reconciled payment and marks every point a person is doing a machine's work. It starts at AED 3,000 and the output is a map, not a proposal.
