There are key differences between bookkeepers and accountants that you want to know before hiring a financial professional. You know what a bookkeeper does and what their day-to-day responsibilities look like. But how do these job duties translate as benefits for your business? A bookkeeper can help ensure your business finances are organized and lets you focus on running and growing your small business. There’s a variety of methods you can use to figure out how much to budget for taxes, but they depend on you knowing your average month-to-month income.
Some bookkeepers may also have to facilitate financial transactions and ensure transactions are legally compliant. As we’ve covered in this guide, a bookkeeper is highly valuable to a small business and can provide more services than just financial recording and compliance. Often a bookkeeper will specialize in a particular industry, so it pays to ask them about this so that they can add even more value. Make sure that you get the best out of your business by hiring a bookkeeper to help you along your journey.
How we can help you hire bookkeepers now
This might be why, on average, business owners who hire bookkeepers see a 16% increase in profits. If your revenue is on the rise but your bottom line won’t move, it means you need to increase your profit margins. Tax-ready financial statements from a bookkeeper can help you recognize where you need to cut costs in order to make your business more profitable. When you fall behind on bookkeeping, your books stop reflecting the actual state of your finances. That makes it harder (sometimes impossible) to understand cash flow and accurately gauge the health of your business. Companies often throw around titles without thinking about how the job title describes the duties for that role.
Bookkeeping requires fewer skills and work, so hiring a bookkeeper instead of an accountant can save you cash and cash equivalents cce definition money in the long run. A small business can likely do all its own bookkeeping using accounting software. Many of the operations are automated in the software, making it easy to get accurate debits and credits entered. Bookkeeping focuses on recording and organizing financial data, including tasks such as invoicing, billing, payroll and reconciling transactions.
- An online bookkeeping solution uses cloud-based software to connect you with a team of bookkeepers, who do your books for you (like Bench).
- The best bookkeeper in the world is totally useless if their computer—and your business’s financial data—is taken offline by an attack.
- I recommend posting to at least three different job boards so you get a good mix of applicants.
- A good bookkeeper keeps your books clean and makes it easy for you to review and query the entries.
Tax-ready financial statements
Consider administering a practical bookkeeping test or assessment to evaluate their technical skills and problem-solving abilities. The CPB is certified by the National Association of Certified Public Bookkeepers (NACPB) and is the more accessible of the two certs. Also, if you have catch-up bookkeeping for them to complete, that will be an additional, one-time project that they need to handle. Learn more about Bench, our mission, and the dedicated team behind your financial success. To see if their communication style is in line with your own, you can ask if they prefer email or phone calls and how often they typically touch base with their clients.
Do I need a bookkeeper if I already have an accountant?
You may also want to see if they’ve handled bookkeeping for other businesses that are around the same size and structure as yours. Maybe you’re not feeling confident enough with your bookkeeping skills and are unsure of where to begin—after all, you can’t be an expert on everything! Not having strong bookkeeping skills can also allow errors to occur.
Use Job Boards
Hiring a local bookkeeping firm is usually a matter of Googling to find which firms are in your area, and then doing your homework to see which ones are the best fit for your business. You can usually ask for references of customers similar to you, so you can get an honest picture of what it’s like working with that firm. There are lots of places online to find a quality freelance bookkeeper, but Upwork.com is a good place to start.
