What is a Bookkeeper?

I went to a local event for Halloween this past year and handed my business card out to some of the vendors there. I introduced myself as a local bookkeeper for small businesses and I had a couple of them ask what a bookkeeper is. So what does a bookkeeper actually do?

To put it simply, a bookkeeper is someone who does the day to day accounting for all the money coming in and going out in a business. We assign every dollar to a category, whether it’s income earned from a certain type of service or supplies you need to buy in order to perform that service. The main difference between an accountant and a bookkeeper is that a bookkeeper performs the actual accounting throughout the year, whereas an accountant will handle taxes and big picture items.

These days, bookkeeping is always done using an accounting software, such as Quickbooks Online. To look at it visually, imagine you’re putting all those transactions into little buckets and the software takes these different buckets and organizes everything for you so that you can have nice, informative reports that quickly tell you how your business is doing.

Bookkeeping also includes tasks like reconciling your bank and credit card accounts to make sure those numbers match every single month. Our job as bookkeepers is to find any discrepancies between what those statements say and what the entries in the bookkeeping software say, and to fix those discrepancies.

Accurate and consistent bookkeeping is how you can easily get up to date reports at any given time when you need to know some quick numbers in order to make important financial decisions. Whether you do it yourself or hire someone to take that off your plate, you can’t afford to NOT have it done!