How To Start A Bookkeeping Business

When starting a bookkeeping business that biggest challenge for many wanna-be freelance bookkeepers is where to gain bookkeeping experience.

Many freelance bookkeepers are sole traders, and have neither the time or the inclination to supervise a junior bookkeeper. Besides that, why should they?

Say we decided to train you up as a bookkeeper, and send you out to work with our clients.

Before long you’ll realise that you don’t need us anymore, so you go out and do the work for yourself. You’ve gained our experience and we’ve gained nothing. Hardly a win-win.

That’s why bookkeepers will more likely sub-contract their clients to other experienced bookkeepers.

Accounting firms have higher fees than bookkeepers, and therefore they have a greater margin to “carry the load” of inexperienced bookkeepers that they may be paying at say $20/hr.

If the accountant charges $150/hr and the bookkeeper takes three or four hours to do the simple job, the accounting firm are still ahead.

If we took on that same inexperienced bookkeeper, it would end up costing us money to train them. And how many bookkeepers are prepared to pay to be trained?

We’ve had four bookkeepers do work for us, and each of these four didn’t do the work correctly – these were so-called experienced bookkeepers – so it ended up costing us money. What we realise is that we have to train every bookkeeper who does work for us. But why should we?

Where To Gain Bookkeeping Experience
Another idea regarding bookkeeping work – charities and community clubs are always looking for volunteers

You could contact them and ask if you can work along-side their bookkeeper to help out with data entry etc – often those bookkeepers are helping out in their spare time and would welcome someone to take the pressure off them

Until you have more experience you probably shouldn’t be doing any of the work on your own – you really need supervision, or at least someone who knows what they are doing and can oversee your work as a bookkeeper.

That’s why there’s no simple solution of where to gain [freelance] bookkeeping experience