Becoming a bookkeeper is a great way to earn money while using your financial knowledge and skills to help a business or individual to manage their financial records and obligations. It can be done from home or at a business’ own premises and opens doors into a wealth of different sectors and career opportunities within the financial arena. All you need to get started is some suitable training, access to a good bookkeeping scanning app or software package and some clients.
What does a bookkeeper do?
Businesses are required by law to keep financial records detailing their incomings and outgoings for accounting, HR and tax purposes. Transactions recorded can include purchases, sales receipts and expenses and are all calculated by the bookkeeper or accountant to assess the business’ financial standing.
Other tasks that a bookkeeper can be asked to carry out include processing invoices for payment, overseeing payroll for any and all employees, calculating profit and loss, making financial forecasts and estimates, balancing the ‘books’, filing tax returns and managing expenses.
What skills do they need?
Apart from the obvious requirement to have a good head of figures and an analytical, mathematically inclined mind, a good bookkeeper will show a number of additional traits. These include excellent organisational skills, a methodical approach with good attention to details, strong communication skills and the highest standards of honesty, discretion and morality.
One of the most important skills is data entry. You need to be accurate and be able to use software that will ease your work. This way you can also avoid any human made mistakes and have the application or software fix. This often happens within the calculation process.
You will be dealing with the business owners and manager, as well as employees, suppliers and HMRC. Being able to explain financial data and tax implications is crucial too, as many of the people you deal with will not have a financial background or time to delve into the deeper world of taxation and HMRC – which is why you will have been hired, to know about it and do it for them!
What can it lead to?
Being a bookkeeper can lead to all sorts of different careers and job roles. You can commit to bookkeeping or accountancy as a long-term career, or use it as a spring board to management, HR or business development. Small businesses often enable bookkeepers to take on increasing amounts of responsibility as a smaller team means that there are greater opportunities to be noticed.
A larger company offers greater scope and variety in potential other roles, as well as a higher training budget. Another area of specialism that you could investigate is around tax advising and planning. This is a lucrative sector to be in, and will mean that your skills and advice will be in constant demand. Ultimately, it is be up to you and your individual aspirations and other demands on your time and energy what approach you would like to take with regards to a bookkeeping career. The possibilities are vast and the rewards attractive.
