This is an essential question to ask when thinking about whether or
not this career field interests you. In this article we we cover the
basics of what your day to day work life would look like if you become a
bookkeeper for a small business.
The first important thing to understand is that the bookkeeper role,
particularly when it involves smaller businesses, will be highly varied
and dependent on the structure and needs of the individual small
business. Firstly, most small companies don’t have enough volume to make
bookkeeping a full time job, so chances are a full time employee who
was a bookkeeper will typically have outside random responsibilities to
fill up their 40 our work week. Secondly, the nature of the business
will obviously have a great influence on what the daily financial
transactions that need to be recorded typically look like.
What is the job of a bookkeeper like on a day to day basis? |
This being true, it’s hard to describe exactly what your daily
routine will look like as a bookkeeper because it will honestly be very
different if employed by small business “X” versus small business “Y.”
However, there are some general traits of a bookkeeping job that will be
fairly universal regardless of where you end up working, so lets go
over those first.
The bookkeeper job description part 1 – general aspects of a typical bookkeeping job
1.Bookkeeper jobs typically have you working in an office on a computer most of the day
The bulk of a bookkeepers job is recording all financial
transactions, and that won’t change regardless of where you’re working.
The only variable here is going to be volume, meaning the size and
nature of a small business will influence how much time per work day
you’ll spend recording these transactions. That being said, you can
expect to be sitting on your computer working with bookkeeping software
for most of the day. If your ideal job has you up and about, bookkeeping
might not be a good fit. If the idea of working at a desk most of the
day appeals to you, bookkeeping and accounting will definitely be your
speed.
2. Bookkeeper jobs limit your daily interaction with other people
Bookkeeping tasks do not necessitate interactions with others, and to
be perfectly honest a bookkeeper will typically need to be in solitude
and undistracted for much of his or her work day to complete the job.
More introverted people often prefer this type of work environment. If
however, you’re more of an extrovert who enjoys connecting and
interacting with others as part of your job, chances are you’ll find
more fulfillment in the sales area of a small business rather than the
bookkeeping and accounting area.
Don’t mistakenly think that every bookkeeper and accountant is a
recluse who never talks to anyone else. Far from it. In fact, concise
and effective communication with others is a mandatory skill that any
bookkeeper must have to be successful at his or her job. Bookkeepers
must clarify with others on the details of financial transactions to
record them accurately. Moreover, bookkeepers must interpret the
information provided by the books and relay that to decision makers so
that they understand the financial picture of their small business.
Even though that is true, most of a bookkeepers duties require him or
her to work on a computer by themselves and make entries, organize and
sort financial data, look at financial reports, and process daily items
such as company invoices and bills.
3. Bookkeeper jobs are quantitative – you’ll be working with numbers all day
Hopefully this is rather obvious to you by now, but for the sake of
this article it bears repeating. As a bookkeeper, your life is numbers.
You must post financial transactions accurately. You must make sure
various accounts are in balance and match banking statements. You must
look at financial reports and analyse numeric trends and contribute to
business decisions that need to be made based off those numbers. A
bookkeeper’s job isn’t particularly abstract or profound, but it is
defined with hard numeric data.
4. Bookkeeping jobs are generally repetitive
It’s important to discuss the not so desirable aspects of any job so
that you have a truly accurate idea of what you should expect if you
choose it. Of course, all jobs have their less desirable downsides, so
your goal should be to decide how much you think these downsides matter
to you when compared to the bookkeeper’s job as a whole. There’s no way
around the repetitive nature of booking financial transactions on a
daily basis, particularly when most businesses have a kind of
transaction which occurs many times a day, for example product sales. As
a bookkeeper you’ll spend much of your day entering these repetitive
transactions, and some people indeed prefer and thrive on that kind of
work, while other might not be able to stand it after a short while.
The bookkeeper job description part 2 – a day in the life of a typical bookkeeper for a small business
You now have a general understanding of the main aspects of a
bookkeeper’s job, but it will be even more helpful to read about what a
typical workday for a bookkeeper looks like, so we’ve provided a sample
schedule for a day’s work of a small business bookkeeper. Lets create
some assumptions first:
- The business is large enough such that the bookkeeper is full time
- The business is still small enough, however, that a single person handles all aspects of the bookkeeping, and perhaps other things here and there depending on the circumstances on a given day
- The business is retail oriented, meaning they sell a good or service as their main source of revenue
Here’s what a typical bookkeeper’s day on the 8 to 5 job would look like
8:00am - arrive, check email & voicemail for any
urgent issues, handle as needed. Sort emails and paper documents into
proper categories to be handled later, eg, receipts into the receipts
pile, bills to be paid, invoices to be sent to clients, ect.
8:30am – book all new receipts, eg, company purchases
9:30am – book all bills that need to be paid, print checks to be mailed
10:30am – send invoices to clients for services rendered
11:30am – check email/voicemail again
12:00pm – lunch
1:00pm – check and book all online sales, process any needed refunds
2:00pm – spend time handling any of the following, nondaily essential tasks on an as needed basis, such as
- reconcile bank statements – make sure books are accurate
- do collections, make sure customers are paying
- run financial reports, have meetings with decision makers to talk about short and long term financial business triends
- do any various audits, to make sure past transactions are booked correctly
- record employee hours and process payroll
- prepare a batch of checks to pay company vendors and contractors
- prepare govt. forms for various Federal/State/Local fees, licenses, or taxes that may be due
- prepare a bank deposit
4:30pm – check email again, handle any daily odds and ends, wrap up, go home
Do keep in mind that this is about as general of a summary as there
can be. The nature of and how time consuming these items will vary
greatly from business to business, but as you can see any bookkeeper’s
job will look like your stereotypical desk job. Hopefully this has given
you a good idea of what to expect if you get a job as a bookkeeper.