Bookkeepers can help your business with day-to-day accounts – recording sales and other transactions. But they can do a lot more too. So when does it make sense to hire a bookkeeper?

A bookkeeper is someone who records the financial transactions of your business. They also:

  • keep track of sales, purchases, payments and receipts
  • work on the design maintenance and review of internal business processes
  • organise, collate and record financial data on a day-to-day basis and store this information in general ledgers
  • record the financial information of your business in a standard way, so that accountants can also access it.

Why do you need a bookkeeper?

If you started your own business, it’s likely that you’re passionate about running it and concentrating on the tasks you love doing. But if you’re like most business owners, you’re not so interested in recording all the details of every financial transaction.  

Without proper bookkeeping, it would be easy for transactions to go unrecorded, left to pile up until the end of a financial period. Mistakes could be made and important details could be lost or forgotten.

That's where bookkeepers come in. They can lighten the load on the business. They can take away the day-to-day recording of receipts, invoices and other transactions.

What does a bookkeeper actually do?

Bookkeepers are trained and use the same financial recording methods as accountants. They do this so that your accountant can quickly and easily process your financial information. They will:

  1. Take all your receipts, invoices and other transaction details.
  2. Record the information in accounting software using proper accounting methods.
  3. Work with you to make sense of the numbers, for example assigning costs to specific clients.

But there's more to bookkeeping than recording daily transactions. People who do this work are usually highly skilled at using accounting software. They will be able to advise you on:

  • add-on solutions to streamline your business workflow, such as POS tools
  • payroll services to simplify the way you pay your staff
  • bookkeeping rescue work, tidying up mistakes made by inexperienced staff
  • training for small business on using accounting software.

They can also offer day-to-day support for small business owners. In fact a good bookkeeper is your partner in keeping things running smoothly within your business.