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Celebrating bookkeepers during global bookkeeping week!
For years, bookkeeping has been an integral part of business – bookkeepers manage payroll, reconciliations, monthly financial reports, and so many other important things that help keep a business afloat. Without their expertise, a business simply can’t function – in a way, bookkeepers are the glue that holds a business together.
And bookkeepers don’t just help handle their clients’ finances, they support them; they help them achieve their goals.
So when we set out to answer the question ‘what makes an excellent bookkeeper?’ – it didn’t take us long to come up with 5 things. (In fact, we found it difficult to stick to just 5!)
What makes an excellent bookkeeper?
When we sat down to consider what makes an excellent bookkeeper, the first thing that came to mind was how bookkeepers help mitigate stress for their clients.
For business owners, there are a million things on their mind – they have staff to manage, customers to take care of, products and services to deliver...pile on financial compliances and it sounds stressful, doesn’t it!
Bookkeepers take on this stress for their clients – they take care of everything from staff wages, to invoicing, transaction categorising and bank reconciliations. Taking care of these financial compliances takes a huge weight off of their client's shoulders.
Starting to see why we think bookkeepers are so awesome?!
The second reason we came up with when we posed the question ‘what makes an excellent bookkeeper’ was their high level of attention to detail!
When it comes to managing finances – managing numbers – it’s important to note that even the tiniest mistake can cause huge repercussions (imagine accidentally adding an extra zero for instance).
For many business owners, taking care of their own finances with a high attention to detail might be near impossible to achieve. As we established, business owners have too much on their minds! Plus, bookkeeping isn’t their area of expertise; entrepreneurship is.
This is where the awesome bookkeeper comes in again! Bookkeepers are detail-focused experts. They spend their days staring at numbers – their minds are number-focused and they’re highly concentrated. Think about how difficult that must be? But they do it every day, and that’s pretty awesome if you ask us.
Something else that we think makes bookkeepers awesome is their sense of integrity and transparency. When it comes to taking care of other people’s finances, it is of central importance to bookkeepers that they keep their clients' financial details safe, private, and secure.
And bookkeepers do this with such integrity. While this is a legal obligation, we see time and time again from the bookkeeping community how they go the extra mile to not only uphold integrity, but also transparency when handling their clients’ financial data.
It isn’t just about keeping things private, it’s also about being consistently and continuously transparent, open, and honest with their clients about how their financial data is performing – offering expert advice where applicable.
It is this integrity that we see in our customers and the wider bookkeeping community that really helps us answer the question ‘what makes an excellent bookkeeper?’
Nowadays, one of the things we love most about bookkeepers is their adaptability to change – particularly with regard to the rise of technology in the industry. Today, what makes an excellent bookkeeper has a lot to do with their agile use of online bookkeeping software and modern advisory tools.
Traditionally bookkeepers used to do all of their data management manually via spreadsheets (which, by the way is already awesome because think about how much time and concentration that would’ve taken!) – but today, they optimise agile online bookkeeping tools.
Bookkeepers optimise modern online bookkeeping software systems such as Xero and Aider, in order to better serve their clients. Today, we are continually impressed by bookkeepers and their approach of going the extra mile by using modern online bookkeeping tools to improve their services. Because bookkeeping isn’t just about crunching numbers anymore – it’s about building strong client relationships; it’s about helping clients achieve their goals.
Which leads us to our final reason…
Our final reason for why we think bookkeepers are awesome (well, final in these 5 points we narrowed it down to!) is that bookkeepers are client-centric. We’ve worked with bookkeepers for a long time, and one thing we can tell you for certain is that they go above and beyond for their clients.
As we mentioned, bookkeeping is no longer just about “crunching numbers”, it’s about fostering client relationships – it’s about mitigating financial stress for business owners, so that they can focus on growing their business and achieving their goals.
What makes an excellent bookkeeper these days is their commitment to their client relationships. They make themselves readily available for their clients – working as an extension of their business with continuous communication, support and advice.
When we set out to write this article, it took us only a few moments to think of what makes an excellent bookkeeper. We work with bookkeepers every day, and their commitment to helping their clients never ceases to impress us. We count ourselves lucky to work with such kind, knowledgeable people, and we are excited to shine a light on their excellence this week during global bookkeeping week.
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