Do it yourself if your affairs are simple and you will genuinely keep up; outsource if the honest answer to that is no. Modern software has narrowed this considerably — with a bank feed and receipt capture, a sole trader’s bookkeeping is often twenty minutes a week of approving suggestions, and paying someone to do that is poor value. The calculation changes when you have staff, stock, CIS, multiple income streams, or a track record of leaving it until it is a crisis. The hidden cost of self-managed books is not the time, it is the year-end: if your categories are wrong, we spend our fee unpicking them, and you pay for both. Many of our clients land on a middle position where they do the routine and we review each quarter.