Many individuals have a dream to start a business and they make it happen (yay and congrats!). Let’s carry this further many do not have any experience in bookkeeping and to make matters worse are not “number” people (anyone who is not a number person knows exactly what I am talking about). When a bookkeeper or staff accountant comes in and speaks about accounting software, reconciles, JEs and financial reporting it can be overwhelming to the owners. However, you can’t have a business without accounting.
The term bookkeeper or accountant have often been used interchangeably (we don’t really care what you call us), maybe Queen of Spain it has a nice ring to it, but what we are hired to do is to keep the records of the financial affairs of the business up to date and in order. This gives the business owner clean financials that let them see EVERYTHING going on in a way that makes sense (yay). To do this we take all of the transactions that have occurred each month (ex: debit card, credit card, and bank deposits) add them to your accounting software and make sure everything balances to the penny (reconciled). This is the very first step of what we do. We are not a CPA firm, but often our clients have used the term accountant / bookkeeper interchangeably when referring to our work.
We are REALLY good at what we do, so much so that we often take over projects from fancy CPA firms ($400/hr CPA rates) who also provide bookkeeping services. Often a CEO wants the BEST and they assume their top dollar CPA firm can provide the top bookkeeping service. After taking over multiple bookkeeping projects from CPA firms I like to summarize it like this, we specialize in organizing and customizing your books to each of our clients individual business based needs. We keep it clean and transparent. Your CPA is up to speed on Tax Law and can advise on decisions as to your best position related to Corporate tax decisions and process your tax return. When the CPA firms receive our super awesome clean financial reports they love our services. We work hand in hand. The client loves the clean transition and it works like clockwork. I just used the word love repeatedly in this article so apparently, I love what I do. I have worked with many different CPA firms and built wonderful relationships with them, but we specialize in bookkeeping and we are darn good at it. Think top 1% bookkeepers, think PAS Consulting, LLC. Thanks for reading.