What Is Bookkeeping?
Bookkeeping is the recording, summarizing and reporting of financial transactions related to your business. It's the process of tracking and organizing your financial information in order to create accurate financial statements, whether they're monthly statements or annual statements. The books you're keeping could be your own personal books or they could be the bookkeeping for a company whose books you are keeping for them.
Bookkeeping is a valuable part of running any type of business, whether it's a sole proprietorship, partnership or corporation. When you don't have someone who's skilled at keeping the books, it can lead to errors and mistakes that can negatively affect your business on so many levels—from late payments when invoices aren't recorded correctly to not being able to accurately project future financial success because records aren't being kept correctly.
Duties of a bookkeeper
As a bookkeeper, you will be the one who handles all of the finances of the company. You will be responsible for keeping track of how much money is coming in and how much money is going out, making sure that everything is accurate, and filing taxes on behalf of the company. This isn't something that you can just do without any training or experience, either. You need to understand the basics of bookkeeping and accounting so that you can properly serve your client.
During the course of your work as a bookkeeper, you will be in charge of doing things like creating monthly financial statements and maintaining payroll records. Even if you aren't doing payroll yourself, you still need to have a firm understanding of it so that you know what's going on when it comes time to pay an employee. Without this knowledge, you won't be able to give great service to your clients.
You should also be aware that bookkeeping isn't an easy thing to do. While it's true that some people are naturals at it, most people who are new at it have had to take classes or get trained in order to get better at it.
