Welcome to Bookkeepers Canberra!

Hi there. If you’ve managed to find this site, then chances are you that you’ve been searching Google for something like “Bookkeeping Services Canberra”, or “Bookkeepers Canberra”.

I’m not a bookkeeper and don’t offer any bookkeeping services myself.  I set up BookkeepersCanberra.com.au in order to help small businesses find the right bookkeeping services in Canberra and to remove some of the hassle in doing so.

Why did I decide to do this?

I’m a small business owner who knows what is like to be faced with an overdue BAS, months of bank reconciliations that need to be caught up on, and the daunting task of trying to decipher the latest GST ruling all at the last minute.

I’ve felt this pain first hand, and it is not the sort of thing that I plan to go through again any time soon. Hopefully this website can help you find out what a bookkeeper can do for your business, so you can avoid the mistake that I made by trying to do it all myself and leaving it much late.

On this site I will outline for you why I think that small business owners should outsource their bookkeeping, what you need to look for when choosing a bookkeeper and introduce you to one of the bookkeeping services in Canberra that I found to be reputable.

Why Outsource Bookkeeping?

Bookkeeping Services Canberra - Folders

Keeping things organised would have saved alot of stress

For me it all started when I decided that I’d take care of my own bookkeeping in order to keep costs low.

The thing is, bookkeeping is the type of activity that needs to be done regularly.  The problem I found as a small business owner was that I have many demands on my time, which inevitably meant that I didn’t keep my records up to date.  I just kept an eye on my bank accounts and figured I could catch up when I found the time.

But somehow I never did find the time – not until my tax was due.  Then I had to catch up all at once, trying to rapidly gather all the information I needed and gritting my teeth all the way.  Trying to do it all at once was not fun in the slightest!

Small business owners have many different demands on their time, whether it is attracting new customers, keeping existing customers happy, training staff, and solving the day to day problems that inevitably crop up.  Often we are too busy to do the bookkeeping ourselves, or it just isn’t a good use of our time when there are more pressing matters to take care of.

But if the bookkeeping doesn’t get done, then there can be big problems:

  • if accounts receivable aren’t be monitored, there can be cashflow shortages;
  • staff might not get paid properly (or at all); and
  • ATO deadlines might get missed.

All of this could cause more stress than actually doing the bookkeeping in the first place!

But for those of us who don’t have accounting or bookkeeping qualifications, there is a lot to get on top of in order to maintain the accounts for a small business.  It is the type of area where it is easier to get an expert involved – so that we can be sure that the job is done properly.

For those organisations which don’t have the resources to hire a qualified bookkeeping professional, the best option is probably to turn to one of the bookkeeping services in Canberra – I certainly wish that I had done so sooner.

How to Avoid Choosing the Wrong Bookkeeper

When I didn’t stay on top of the bookkeeping for my business it loomed over like a long overdue high-school assignment.   Most of the time I tried to ignore it.  But it was always there – until I couldn’t put it off any longer.

But if things were under control then I wouldn’t have felt this way.

If I had gotten a bookkeeper in sooner, then everything would have been dandy.  I would have exchanged some money to have my books in tip-top shape, freed up some of my time, reduced my stress and made myself available to work on higher value tasks.  Right?

Well, it might have been – if the bookkeeper knew their stuff.  If they worked out…

But what if I went to a bookkeeper who didn’t know their stuff?  Or who wasn’t reliable and professional?   Not only would the books for my business  need fixing, but I would probably have to spend extra money and/or time trying to correct things.

Bookkeepers Canberra

A good bookkeeper needs more than just a knack for numbers

For me it was crucial to make sure that I was dealing with a professional bookkeeper who was reliable, competent and suitable for my business.   And with the technical skills that I could rely on.  In this post I look at how we can find a good bookkeeper (and avoid the bad ones).

 

Choosing the Right Bookkeeper For Your Business

The first thing to do when choosing a bookkeeper is to define what it is that we are really after.

There are a whole bunch of different services that bookkeepers offer, so it is important to identify what it is that we are comfortable to do ourselves, and what we want a hand with.

For example:

  • Do we just need a hand with payroll, or a BAS Agent to help out with those pesky ATO obligations?
  • Do we want someone to help manage our accounts receivables and accounts payable?
  • Would we like someone to help with bank reconciliations, or is this the sort of thing that you are happy to do ourselves?
  • Are we after someone to just do the data entry, but not the higher level reporting?
  • Do we want the bookkeeping done on site, or are we happy for it to be done remotely?
  • Do we already use a particular accounting program (such as MYOB, Quicken or an online service) that we want the bookkeeper to be able to use?

The next things to consider are the qualities that we want your bookkeeper to have.  These make for great questions when interviewing a prospective bookkeeper for the first-time. We want to make sure that the bookkeeper we end up engaging knows their stuff, is reliable and is a good fit for our business.

General Questions to Ask

For starters, we can see how they measure up to a number of non-technical questions, many of which we may be able to answer by looking at their website or advertisements, such as:

These are the sort of questions that can very quickly help to decide if a particular bookkeeper is potentially suitable to work with, and to get a feel for whether they are reliable, ethical, honest and are a good fit for our business.

Another question you might like to ask, to see what sort of practical approach a bookkeeper will take in their work, is:

The bank account is off $0.72. How long will you spend looking for the problem and what steps will you take to find it?

This problem is tricky and really depends on what you would like to see in the right bookkeeper. Some won’t stop looking until they find it. Sure, there could be numerous things causing any discrepancy so you do want them to spend some time looking for the problem. But how much time? Is spending 2 hours looking for $.72 the best use of time? If we look at return on investment, that’s absolutely a bad use of time. If they answer 2 hours, you’ll want investigate their tolerance for non-perfect circumstances. If you’re in the creative field, an extreme perfectionist may just drive you insane. If, however, they won’t look for the error at all, their attention to detail probably isn’t strong enough and you should keep looking.

When looking for the error, the ideal candidate will say it’s likely a transposition error and they would start there first (transposition errors are divisible by 9). They may just say they would check every line item against the statement, which is perfectly valid.

So there we have it, a bunch of questions which you can apply to whittle down the bookkeepers in Canberra and help find the right one for you. That way you can avoid getting a dud, and the time, money and stress that this would cost.

This process can take a bit of effort if you are trying to find just the right bookkeeper for your needs.

If you’d like to save some of this hassle then I have a Bookkeeping Service in Canberra that I can recommend.

Bookkeeping Services Explained

Once I realised I needed a hand with my bookkeeping and tax obligations, I wondered to myself:

“So what can a bookkeeping service do for me and what does it involve?”

The first step for me was to figure out whether bookkeepers offer all the things I wanted a hand with, or whether I would need to turn to an accountant to get what I was after. In this post I’ll take a look at the differences and the basic services that bookkeepers offer.

Bookkeeping vs Accounting – What is the Difference

Bookkeepers Canberra

Bookkeepers specialise in recording and reconciling transactions

Bookkeeping is the process of recording transactions in the ‘books’ of an organisation.

Modern bookkeeping involves the use of a ‘double entry’ account system and maintaining various different ‘ledger‘ accounts.  This process of recording transactions goes on throughout the year and ends up in the bookkeeper producing a ‘trial balance‘, which is used to ensure that make sure the debits and credits (the positive and negative entries in each account) are properly recorded.  This occurs before preparing the financial reports to reflect the overall status of the accounts, which is when the accountant officially takes over.

The role of the accountant is to prepare the higher level reports and financial statements, such as the balance sheet (which summarises the assets and liabilities), a profit and loss statement (which shows how much money a business is making or losing), a statement of cash flow (which shows cash in and cash out).  Accountants usually start off as bookkeepers and need to have a very good understanding of how transactions are recorded.

In practice, the categories of bookkeeping and accounting overlap.  Many bookkeepers will be able to perform the typical accounting functions, and most accountants should be proficient at recording day to day transactions.

What a Bookkeeping Service Can Do For You

Precisely what bookkeeping services are offered by a particular bookkeeper will vary. But they can cover things like:

  • ATO compliance, including tax returns, calculating the amount of GST balances for BAS statements, and making sure that these statements are lodged on time
  • Doing data entry into accounting software (such as MYOB or Quicken)
  • Providing training on how to use accounting software (if you want to do some of the bookkeeping yourself)
  • Reconciling bank accounts, chequebooks and credit cards to make sure all the transactions from these sources are recognised in the accounts for your business
  • Managing inventory
  • Manual bookkeeping
  • Preparing accounting reports at the end of month or end of year
  • Preparing profit and loss statements / balance sheets / statements of cash flow (even though these are ‘accounting’ jobs)
  • Managing accounts payable and accounts receivable
  • Payroll processing including calculating leave entitlements, superannuation and PAYG
  • Sales Invoicing
  • Grant acquittals

The combination of these things can take a serious amount of time for a small business operator.  But without these thigns getting done, it may not be possible to keep a clear picture of where the business is at.

Even just outsourcing a few of these can make a big difference in the one’s stress levels and the amount of time available to deal with other parts of the business (which can save a lot of money). Precisely how much you choose to outsource depends on how much capacity you need to free up, and what represents good value for money.

If you are after a Canberra bookkeeper to help save you time and money by taking care of some of these things, then you might like to check out my recommended Bookkeeping Services in Canberra.