What to look for in a bookkeeper?

There are so many bookkeepers that while it is progressive to think of getting a younger person whom you can also pay less than a more experienced bookkeeper already in your employ, stop and think.

Can you really afford to lose a great bookkeeper? How do you know that the bookkeeper in your company is good enough to hold on to?

 1. Experience

The word has been used so often that it has become a cliché. Even though less experienced and probably less qualified bookkeepers are cheaper to hire, even comparing hourly rates, remember that a high-paid bookkeeper only seems like they are high-paid.

The speed and street-smarts that experienced bookkeepers bring to a task can cut risk, time, and mistakes. What you pay them is in a way equivalent to what you might pay a fresher to do, but the quality of work output is far superior with one and tentative with the other.

Your bookkeeper’s rate may be high but it reduces your expenses along several lanes.

2. Training & Certification

This is quite obvious, but any bookkeeper worth their skill should have formal accounting and bookkeeping training. It will be better if they are a registered BAS Agent; meaning they have received a nod from the Tax Practitioners Board. A QuickBooks certification is also important.

All of this translates to sufficient experience and qualifications for the bookkeeper to account for GST and prep BAS reports according to legislation.

3. Research

Professional bookkeepers do not just sit in a corner and behave like automatons. They are professional business people who need to stay updated on current affairs in the bookkeeping world.

The ability to research changing technologies and learn how to use them can save so much automating and processing time if the company decides to adopt the new tech. For example, your accounting software can be linked to your bank feeds, veritably saving you more than 15 hours of work per month. Imagine if your experienced bookkeeper has mastered the software that a fresher will have sat scratching their heads over.

 4. Understanding

Taking the time to understand the ins and outs of your business is part of a bookkeeper’s duties. Not only can they put forth suggestions based on their own particular skill sets, those ideas could well save the company hundreds if not thousands in unwanted expenses each month.

Such knowledge also serves the bookkeeper who can then avoid mistakes and duplications because they had an understanding of this or that company process.

5. Questions

When you stop asking questions that is when you stop learning. A good bookkeeper stays political, silent, and lethargic when it comes to research. But a great bookkeeper, especially one with years of experience, make sure that transactions are ideally allocated.

To this end, they ask questions even if they have to make several calls to do so. They can save plenty of cash for their company when it comes to factors like tax deduction claims. On a similar note, saying ‘I do not know’ can save a lot of trouble down the line.

Great bookkeepers show all these signs and put them in action every day at work.