Data prices · Accounting & bookkeeping

What AI labs pay for accounting data

AI labs building bookkeeping and close agents pay for real ledgers, reconciliation histories and the decisions behind adjustments. No public price list exists for accounting data, so prices are set per deal, and client consent rules decide what an accounting firm may license at all.

What buyers want

Records your team already keeps

Ledgers across many clients

Real charts of accounts, categories and adjustments over several years.

Reconciliation trails

How mismatches were found and fixed, step by step, from the audit log.

Close procedures

The checklists and order of work your team follows at month-end.

Outcomes

Invoices paid late, write-offs and corrections that show how things turned out.

Price signals

What public deals and research show

$85/hr

Average pay to the experts, including accountants and bankers, that Mercor supplies to AI labs (October 2025). Labs pay for this work because real expert data is scarce.

Contrary Research

~$20k

Typical price for a working replica of an app that agents practice in, a format ledger systems can be turned into.

Epoch AI, 2026

We found no public sale price for ledger or bookkeeping data. Treat any per-record figure you see quoted as a guess until a buyer names a price for your sample.

The wider market

$203M

Data licensing contracts Reddit disclosed in early 2024, with terms of two to three years.

TechCrunch

$250M+

Reported value of News Corp's five-year content deal with OpenAI, including cash and credits.

Press Gazette

$10k-$100k

Per-company payouts for shut-down startups' Slack messages, tickets and email archives, across nearly 100 deals.

Forbes, April 2026

$200-$2,000

Typical price per reinforcement learning task, according to Epoch AI's interviews with people who build them.

Epoch AI, 2026

Pricing factors

What moves the price

Client consent: For tax return information, US preparers need written client consent before any use beyond preparing returns. Without it, that data stays out.
Audit trails: Edit histories turn a ledger into episodes of real decisions, which sell at higher prices than static rows.
Breadth: Many clients across industries and sizes beat one large client.
Years of history: Longer runs of records show change over time and how outcomes played out, which a single year can't.
Rights you can prove: Buyers pay for data you own or are allowed to license. Data held for customers without their permission won't sell, so our calculator cuts the estimate when rights are unclear.

Our calculator

How we estimate accounting data

Our indicative model starts from a base value per system for about five years of history at an 11-50 person company, then applies a sector weight of 1.3x, your history, team size and rights. It is an estimate we confirm on a call, not a market price.

System	Base value
Accounting (Xero, QuickBooks)	$20k
CRM (Salesforce, HubSpot)	$15k
Docs, wikis & SOPs	$10k

Recurring

Paid again every month

Every month adds invoices, journals and reconciliations, so a firm on a refresh term gets paid for each month's batch. A growing client list means bigger batches.

How recurring revenue works

Rules that apply

US tax return preparers face criminal and civil penalties for using or disclosing return information without written consent, and the AICPA code bars disclosing confidential client information without the client's specific consent. We check both before anything moves.

Source: 26 U.S.C. 7216

Questions

Accounting data, answered

Can an accounting firm sell client data at all?

Only what your engagement terms and the client consent rules allow. Tax return information needs written consent under US rules, so we review your engagement letters first and leave out anything we can't clear.

What leaves the firm?

Scrubbed records: client names, emails and account numbers removed, rare amounts turned into ranges, dates rounded to the month. You review a sample before any buyer sees it.

Which systems do you work with?

Xero and QuickBooks have connectors in our SDK, and other systems can start from an export.

Keep reading

Selling accounting data

Data types

Selling accounting data to AI companies

Labs want real ledgers, reconciliations and close procedures. Client consent rules, including IRC 7216 for tax data, decide what an accounting firm can license.

6 min read

Selling data

Can I sell data I hold for my customers?

Usually not without their written permission. If you process data on your customers' behalf, it is theirs to license, and your contracts decide what you may do with it.

5 min read

Privacy and law

De-identification vs anonymization

De-identification removes or masks what points to a person. Anonymization means no one can reasonably identify them again. The law treats the two very differently.