Why I Hate Being Called a Bookkeeper, Volume 2: The Mundane Everyday
A bookkeeper just:
"takes care of receipts and keeps a running total of ins and outs”
"(has a) functional financial tracking role"
Nope, heeeell nope. THIS IS NOT JUST WHAT BOOKKEEPERS DO! I guess it’s possible that maybe some very bored bookkeepers do ONLY spend all their days looking at what’s coming in and out of a business. Crikey, that sounds mind-numbingly boring. I do deal with everyday transactions - but it’s by far the very minimum of what I do. And if that’s all I did, I’d be carted off to some sort of institution pretty quickly.
When I took my first qualifications at college and uni over 18 years ago (yikes!), they covered a huge amount. Debits and credits (the fancy way of saying “stuff going in and out” of the accounts) were probably a tiny part of a very brief page of a very short first chapter in the text book. 'Bookkeeping' was one tiny module of several dozen concerned with every aspect of personal and small business accounts. I ended up qualified in personal tax, business tax, management accounting, costing, budgeting, limited company accounting, statutory accounts… And your eyes have probably just glazed over that bit because all those words are so dull. Over the years, I've added more strings to that bow, and I'm a huge proponent of services that wouldn’t immediately scream ‘bookkeeping’ at you.
I'm what you might call 'boutique' - I don’t just onboard an endless stream of clients from just any industry and churn out their accounts like a robot. I have a small number of owners and founders that I selectively work with, who have businesses that are fascinating and fun. It means I become a financial co-pilot for my clients. I'm always tuned in, always thinking about what can be improved, what is going well for them, what hasn’t worked so well. I'm there when the proverbial might hit the fan (Covid, anyone?!), because in the end - I CARE about the businesses I work with. It’s how I can produce the results and fulfil a role that my clients come to expect of me. And that role might very easily include:
producing and walking my clients through detailed management reports full of targeted KPIs
creating and maintaining a real-time cashflow forecast so that they know where their business is going to be three days, weeks, months, or years down the line
chasing outstanding invoices for my clients
negotiating prices with suppliers
finding a technical solution for an operational issue so that software and apps can communicate with one another
or even just being on the other end of the phone whilst they have a good old moan about something that’s going on in their personal or business lives.
So, yeah. Another reason why the term ‘Bookkeeper’ just doesn’t seem to fit. Maybe I need to come up with something new. Like ‘Bookkeeper Plus’, ‘Bookkeeper on Steroids’. Or perhaps something a little less crap.
Potential clients who really could benefit from working with us simply aren’t seeing our value because of persistent stereotypes like this. The more we talk about what we REALLY do, the more people are going to see that it’s not all about box-ticking and compliance – working with experienced financial service providers like us really can make all the difference.