White label bookkeeping for CPA firms that deliver it under their own name

In the outsourcing sense, white label bookkeeping means a provider’s staff close your clients’ books while your firm keeps the relationship and the brand. The provider stays invisible, you review and deliver the results, and you mark up the cost. It solves a capacity problem, and for firms that cannot hire fast enough it can be the right answer.

In the software sense, it means the ledger your clients log in to is presented as your firm’s own product. That answers a different set of questions: what name clients see on their dashboard, where the working records live, and what happens to them if a provider relationship ends. Many CPA firms buy the labor first and only think about the software when a client asks why the portal shows somebody else’s logo.

The two can be combined. A firm can license branded software and staff it with its own people, with contractors, or with an outsourced team working inside the firm’s workspace. HelloBooks covers only the software half of that picture. What it does not cover is the labor itself, so a firm planning to outsource should still choose that provider on its own merits.

For a CPA firm that mainly does tax and advisory work, adding recurring bookkeeping is as much a packaging exercise as a technical one. The software setup is the shorter part; deciding which clients to offer it to, what to charge and who will do the monthly work usually takes more thought.

The sequence below is how most firms approach it. Starting with existing tax clients who already trust you tends to make the first months smoother than chasing unfamiliar prospects with an untested service. They already know your standards and your people, and their feedback on the branded software is easier to act on while the group is small.

• Decide who does the monthly work: your staff, contractors or an outsourced team.
• License the software and set your app name, logo, colors and templates during onboarding.
• Price bookkeeping packages and place each client company on a published HelloBooks plan.
• Invite a pilot group of existing clients to sign in on your firm’s branded page.
• Review the first closes from the firm console, then widen the offer.

The AI takes the first pass on every client’s transactions, proposing categories and pairing bank lines with recorded invoices and bills during reconciliation. Anything it cannot place with confidence is held for a person. That shrinks the pile of routine coding, which is exactly the work CPA firms find hardest to staff profitably.

Your preparers, whether employees or contractors, confirm and correct that work, chase client questions and close each period. Reviewers and partners use the firm console, which lists every client with its close status and the items waiting, to see which books are ready for sign-off. Staff seats are unlimited, so an outside bookkeeping team can be given logins inside your branded workspace rather than running your clients on its own tools.

That last point is often overlooked. When contracted bookkeepers work inside a system your firm controls, replacing them later is a staffing change, not a migration of every client’s records. It also means client questions and supporting documents stay attached to the transactions in your ledger, so a reviewer at your firm can see the full history no matter who prepared the books that month.

Clients sign in on a page presenting your firm and work inside software carrying your app name, logo and colors. Invoices, statements and reports use your document templates, so a financial statement sent to a bank looks like a product of your practice. Owners can check invoices, bills and reports between meetings without calling your office.

The address runs on your firm’s subdomain of hellobooks.ai from the first day. Your own domain, and email sent from your firm’s domain, arrive at full launch and are not available yet. The software works in any browser, including on phones; a native app under your firm’s name is a future add-on rather than a current feature.

For a CPA firm, this consistency extends the brand clients already trust for tax work into the monthly relationship. The same name appears on the return, the engagement letter and the bookkeeping software, which makes it easier to present bookkeeping as part of one advisory service rather than a separate product bolted on.

Your firm pays HelloBooks a flat monthly license. Each client company sits on a published HelloBooks plan, and your firm receives a discount on every plan. You bill clients for bookkeeping at a price your engagement letters set, and HelloBooks never invoices them. The margin between what you charge and what you pay belongs to your practice, and the pricing table on this page shows the current figures.

Outsourced white-label bookkeeping usually prices labor per client or per hour, and your margin is the markup on that cost. It can pair with branded software rather than replace it. Accountant partner programs from the large ledger vendors offer discounted subscriptions and firm consoles, but clients keep using the vendor’s product under the vendor’s name, so the software never becomes part of your firm’s own brand.

A useful exercise is to model one typical client under each route: the labor cost, the software cost and the price you could charge. Because HelloBooks bills only the firm and never the client, the numbers in that model are yours to set, and the software line stays predictable as the practice grows.

Onboarding takes about two working weeks. Branding, templates and your subdomain are prepared with you, and your team learns the console and review queues. Firms that sign before full launch receive founding-firm terms, which is worth knowing if you are planning a bookkeeping launch around a particular season. Many CPA firms prefer to go live outside their busiest filing months, when partners have time to review the first closes properly.

The client records are your firm’s property, and you can take an export of them at any point. If you leave, you keep read-only access for a period, which protects you when a client asks about a prior year after the move. For CPA firms with retention obligations of their own, that control over the records is often the deciding point in favor of keeping the ledger under the firm’s name.

If the real problem is that nobody at your firm has time to do bookkeeping, software alone will not fix it. You would still need an outsourcing provider or additional hires, and HelloBooks does not supply either. The license makes sense once you know who will do the work. Once you do, the software makes that team faster and puts the result under your name.

It is also a weaker fit for firms that need their own domain and firm email live before full launch, for practices whose bookkeeping clients insist on a specific vendor brand, and for firms that want payroll or tax preparation inside the same product, since those sit outside this license.

For every other CPA firm, the sensible next step is a small pilot with a few existing bookkeeping clients. It shows your team how the review queues fit your workflow, surfaces pricing questions while they are cheap to fix, and gives partners real closes to review before the service is marketed more widely.

Founding firms go live on a firm subdomain with their name, logo and colors throughout. Your own domain and email sent from your domain arrive at full launch.

Firms usually weigh four ways of putting client books under their name. The difference is whose brand clients see, whether the ledger is included, and who does the work.

One flat license covers your brand, unlimited staff and the firm console. Your clients stay on published HelloBooks plans, and your firm gets 20% off each one. Founding firms go live first on a firm subdomain; your own domain and email from your domain follow at full launch.