What Does a Bookkeeper Do? What is Bookkeeping

A bookkeeper’s primary responsibility is to record and maintain financial transactions for an organization, such as accounts receivables, accounts payables, and payrolls. They ensure that daily financial transactions, including purchases, sales, receipts, and payments, are meticulously recorded and organized. This foundation of accurate and organized financial data is critical for the accountant to analyze and interpret. Most bookkeepers will prepare three major financial statements for your business—the profit and loss statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement.

Bookkeepers might also have to manually add any transactions that aren’t included in the bank feed. The transactions that need to be added will most likely be transactions generated outside of the accounting system, such as cash payments or handwritten checks. It could also involve matching deposits as customer payments to help manage accounts receivable or outgoing transactions as payments against vendor bills. Bookkeepers can wear many different hats depending on what a business needs. That said, most bookkeepers nowadays use business accounting software to do their work.

Start Your Own Bookkeeping Business

Plus, there are a few things that almost every bookkeeper can take care of for your business. Though the role of a bookkeeper is multifaceted, there are some core tenets to what bookkeepers do. Any money that your what exactly does a bookkeeper do client is receiving for his products or services is considered accounts receivable. Accountants provide a lot of analysis and forecasts while bookkeepers maintain the day-to-day operations that make that possible.

The core function of a bookkeeper is to ensure that all bills are paid on time, transactions are recorded correctly, payroll runs on time and taxes are filed correctly. So if you’re looking to hire a bookkeeper, it is essential to create a bookkeeper job description that fills your recruitment funnel with ideal candidates as quickly as possible. A bookkeeper’s role at a company varies by the size and nature of the business.

How to Categorize Expenses and Income

At Bench, our bookkeepers take pride in providing professional, high quality service for their clients. Read some of our recent reviews and see what it could be like having Bench on your books. In colonial America, bookkeepers would record transactions in a “wastebook”—so called because the data would eventually find its way into an official ledger and the original book would go into the trash. If you invoke the guarantee, QuickBooks will conduct an evaluation of the Live Bookkeeper’s work. When selecting a bookkeeping style, business owners have several options.