How To Start A Bookkeeping Business

A bookkeeper with over twenty years of experience in accounting and bookkeeping asked for help in sourcing new clients.

Regardless of how much experience you may have as a bookkeeper, starting a bookkeeping business can be very daunting.

We asked the bookkeeper to help us out with the paperwork for one of our clients, as we were not sure how competant her freelance bookkeeping skills were.

To emulate a “live” situation, we presented her with the paperwork, and told her to go for it. We left her alone for about quarter of an hour while she familiarised herself with the documentation.

There was silence, and then she turned round and said that she couldn’t do this because it was “too overwhelming”.

Remember your first day at a new job? Or the first day at your new school? Everything seems huge and overwhelming. No matter how much experience you have as a bookkeeper, when you go to your first client as a freelance bookkeeper, you will no doubt feel totally overwhelmed.

Fortunately for this particular bookkeeper, we were able to talk her through the paperwork, show her some procedures, and she was then able to tackle the task at hand.

Why was the situation so overwhelming? Why did this bookkeeper with over twenty years of bookkeeping experience have a panic attack?

Simply this: the client had presented us with an A4 archive box full of suppliers’ invoices, and a couple of bank statements, for the 2008 – 2009 financial year.

We were just given the box, and asked to record all the transactions – we had no idea of the nature of the business, no opening balances – nothing.

We’ve many years experience as bookkeepers, and were able to work out how many of the payments were made, though it proved to be quite a challenge, owing to the way that the client has been keeping the paperwork, such as:

• Incorrect cheque numbers were written on invoices
• Statements marked “paid” with no amounts detailed
• Cheques written with no payee
• Invoice amounts altered by hand
• Invoices marked “paid by Cash”
• No record of cash income from sales
• No record of what the cash deposits into the bank account represent
• Bank statements missing
• Cheque books missing
• Deposit books missing

How would you handle a situation like that as a freelance bookkeeper, with no one to turn to.

After we were able guide the bookkeeper in the right direction and get her started, she was then gaining confidence in handling the situation.

A couple of days later she called us and explained that she just had totally failed to grasp the situation of going out into the “big wide world” as a freelance bookkeeper. Regardless of all her experience of twenty years in accounting and bookkeeping, nothing had prepared her for a task of this magnitude.