While you may not notice the difference on the street – they look very similar, after all – there are important differences between a bookkeeper and an accountant. These can impact both the work done for your small business and the price you pay to get that work.
Bookkeepers manage the daily financial records of a business, literally keeping the books. Accountants can have more advisory positions, performing audits, managing reports, and offering advice to business owners.
While there are duties that overlap between bookkeepers and accountants, accountants usually hold degrees and certifications, while bookkeepers may have a two-year degree or none at all.
Keep in mind that there’s no hard line between the two terms. As long as they do misrepresent their qualifications, almost anyone can call themselves an accountant. This isn’t true of CPAs (Certified Public Accountants), which is a designation that requires specialized training.
Bookkeepers vs accountants
When you dive into a search for some financial help, how you frame the search may be more important than the answers you get from the search. If you’re running a business smoothly, have a clear path to the next step, and have someone on staff who understands finance, you might just need some help keeping the books balanced.
In that case, a bookkeeper is going to add the most value to your business. You need a person who can put their head down, do the math, and sort that bag of receipts into something meaningful. A good bookkeeper is going to save you time and money by getting their head quickly around the structure of your business.
An accountant’s time is – largely – wasted on inputting, checking, and balancing. If you’re interested in getting more out of the investments you make, making smarter buying decisions, or want to get a better handle on your cash flow, an accountant is going to be your best bet.
As a decent – but not strict – guideline, you’ll be looking for a bookkeeper when you know what you need done and just need someone to do it and an accountant when you’re not sure what to do.
That’s not a hard and fast line, by any means. Like any other service, the amount you pay is largely dependant on your location, what you need done, and how experienced the practitioner is. Getting taxes prepared for your LLC might fall on the low end, while building out a full reporting suite could run you hundreds of dollars per hour.
You should also be ready for a non-hourly rate when you ask for a quote.
Accountants as business consultants
With more and more technology entering the industry, accountants and bookkeepers have more capacity to focus on how your business works, rather than just on what the numbers are. For bookkeepers, this means less time is spent identifying which expenses go where and more time can be spent double checking entries.
For accountants, it means you’ll spend less time verifying the work that a bookkeeper or other employee has performed. Instead, accountants can now help solve the business problems you have.
This means you can hire an accountant as a consultant, addressing a problem with them as a member of your business instead of as a contractor.
For bookkeeping help email. Ellie@shevas-services.com