officer may be in charge of the payroll for a couple of hundred employees, and have to be familiar with minimum pay rates, convoluted leave calculations, termination pay and much more.
If you’re new to bookkeeping, you may find things such as PAYG tax, superannuation and workers compensation to be quite daunting. Take heart — in Chapter 8, I try to provide you with a step-by-step reference for everything you need to know in order to process your first pay.
Reconcile often, reconcile well
Reconciling bank accounts is one of the core tasks for any bookkeeper (and a process that I talk about in much more detail in Chapter 9). Put simply, a bank reconciliation is when you match everything that’s on your bank statement against everything in your books, double-checking that your work is correct.
Always reconcile the main business account before chasing customers for money, generating activity statements or generating management reports. For small- to medium-sized businesses, this means you probably reconcile accounts once every week or fortnight; for micro businesses, once a month probably does just fine.
Over the years, I’ve worked with and taught lots of bookkeepers: Young and old, qualified and unqualified. Some scarily cocky, others achingly unsure, a few startlingly beautiful and many more rather careworn.
So what separates a good bookkeeper from a bad bookkeeper? Being young and beautiful doesn’t help much, that’s for sure (at least not with bookkeeping). Qualifications help, but aren’t the whole story either. Nay, I reckon what separates the wheat from the chaff is attitude.
A good bookkeeper cares when something doesn’t balance, gets upset when stuff goes missing, and goes a tad apoplectic at the sight of a disorganised office. A good bookkeeper cares that the financial statements make sense, and feels responsible when it comes to getting customers to pay on time. A good bookkeeper, in other words, is worth their weight in gold.
Convince yourself this stuff matters
If you’re already a bona fide, serious bookkeeper, you probably know that doing the books is a vital activity and that without the services you provide, the world would probably grind to a halt. Or, maybe you’re not a bookkeeper at all, but the owner of a small business skim-reading these pages as fast as possible. You want to get your books done with a minimum of fuss, and maximum speed. You hate messing around with receipts, despise filing and feel ill at the very thought of tax returns. That’s okay! In the end, the ‘work’ of bookkeeping actually works for you.
Quit counting sheep
Am I preaching to the converted with all this chat about the importance of bookkeeping? Maybe you’re someone who knows what it means to lie awake at night counting sheep, worrying that the sheep don’t balance.
To you, I have a slightly different message. In this book, I encourage you to cast away your magnifying glass and grab a telescope instead. Sure, you’ve mastered the fine detail, but now you’re ready to move ahead and start looking at financial statements. Is the business making a profit? How does this year compare to last year? Is the business growing at a steady rate?
Surprisingly, I find a lot of bookkeepers don’t give a second thought to financial reports. Even business owners sometimes get so preoccupied generating sales and paying bills that the only measure of profitability becomes how much is left in the bank account.
Don’t miss out on the fun. As a bookkeeper, take the time to read through Profit & Loss reports and Balance Sheets. You can help the owner understand what’s going on in their business, and chances are when you read these reports, you can spot any mistakes you’ve made. As a business owner, these financial reports are the reward for all your hard bookkeeping efforts.
Want to know more? Feel welcome to skip ahead to Chapter 10, which gives the lowdown on both Balance Sheets and Profit & Loss reports.
Do your job well
Whether you’re a professional bookkeeper or a business owner, you almost certainly want to get this bookkeeping lark over with as swiftly as possible. The stumbling block is figuring out how not to overcomplicate things. I’m often taken aback at how much time people take to do their books, wasting hours checking and double-checking, shuffling paper from one place to another.
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