How to Start Your Own Bookkeeping Business: Essential Tips

It’s been used by more than 14,000 other women and men to start a bookkeeping business. The key to time management is creating an effortless bookkeeping accounting system. Take time to sit down and write out a business plan– a roadmap of what you’d like your business to look like.

Or an outsourced contractor that helps with monitoring individual accounts, filing taxes, and preparing financial statements, and more. At my company, one of the specific things we teach accountants and bookkeepers who want to run a virtual bookkeeping service is that they should specialize in a few industries. This is true of any bookkeeper — in person or virtual — that you would hire. It’s https://www.bookstime.com/ especially true of virtual bookkeepers, however, because this will determine if the apps they use to do business are relevant to and compatible with your business. Virtual bookkeeping, also known as cloud accounting, is when a bookkeeper or accountant works with their client remotely. This is made possible through accounting software that allows you and your bookkeeper to share an account.

Set Aside an Emergency Fund for Major Expenses

Increased labor productivity in the construction industry would be a boon for economic growth since housing scarcity remains one of the most pressing issues for Americans. Within chip manufacturing, roughly 50% of entry-level workers have only a high-school or equivalent education level, compared with 38% for all other industries. Over the next 10 years, as the global semiconductor industry is primed to reach $1 trillion, another 50,000 American jobs will be added for roles such as electrical assemblers and industrial technicians.

Be sure that when starting a bookkeeping business with QuickBooks, you use QuickBooks Online; not QuickBooks Desktop. It’s the best accounting application in my experience hands down. One of the most rewarding parts of building your own business is that whatever you put into it, you will see the outcome and reap the benefits. As you move along in your remote bookkeeping services business plan, you get to decide how much time, energy, and motivation you have to give to your endeavor. Business owners alike know that the more you put in, the more you’ll get out. As a small business owner, you get to decide how many clients you want to take on, how much money you want to make, and how many hours you want to work during the day.

Chapter 7 – Stay Up To Date

With the way technology is progressing, and bookkeeping is moving to the cloud, I don’t think this would be a good option for someone who is averse to computers. That isn’t to say you need a ton of tech know-how, but you do need to know how to use a computer and the Internet and not be afraid to Google if you have questions. I found her looking for a bookkeeper, and I offered a free consultation. When we had the consult, we connected immediately, but she waited longer than a month before coming onboard.

Bookkeepers tend to be pretty good at accounting, have good math and basic computer skills. A virtual bookkeeper allows firms both large and small to get expert record-keeping with greater flexibility and reduced cost. Some small businesses choose to do their own bookkeeping to save on costs, while others prefer to hire bookkeeping professionals.

QuickBooks Services

While not all working-class jobs will be safe from automation — retail workers, for instance, do not have a rosy outlook — there has been improvement across the board for lower-income workers. The initial shock of the pandemic hit low-wage workers the hardest, but the recovery since has been more auspicious. Wages have grown nearly three times as fast as in any other recovery period. The wages of the lowest 10th percentile of the workforce — earning an average of $12.50 an hour — grew only 3.9% from 2009 to 2017. Despite inflation, real wages are higher for blue-collar, nonmanagerial, and lower- and middle-wage workers than they were before the pandemic. ChatGPT will not replace the nurse who tends to you at the hospital or the construction worker who remodels your kitchen.

The exact requirements for starting a small business will depend on the state in which you live. You may need to contact your secretary of state or department of revenue for more information on what paperwork you may need to complete to legally establish your bookkeeping business. Doing more with fewer resources is crucial for any business on recovery mode during this COVID-19 times. Having a remote bookkeeper on-board helps you perform more tasks in less time enhancing total business efficiency. And a bookkeeper is a specialist who is trained to record all the financial transactions, perform reconciliation and generate financial reports to give an accurate picture of the company’s financials. An in-house bookkeeper performs all the above functions by managing the company’s financials right from the office location.

Ideally, your vision statement will be one or two sentences that help give an idea to all employees of what goal you are working towards as a company.

Secondly, you can start a virtual bookkeeping business with little investment. You just need a laptop, an internet connection, the right bookkeeping software, and a marketing budget to get started. First and foremost, virtual accounting firms are cost-effective because you are spending (in many cases) no money at all on office rent or utilities. While you may spend some initial money as you shift to offering remote hardware, such as laptops, tablets, or monitors, for your employees, the money you will save will easily make up for these upfront costs. A business must have bookkeeping processes and policies that keep company records up-to-date and accurate. For example, business owners must be diligent about keeping personal and business finances separate.

And as a result, there had been a lot of demand for specialists whose skills are paramount for a successful recovery and business growth in the near future. Remote Bookkeeping and Accounting is one of the business functions that is gathering a lot of steam during these COVID times. PayScale, a site that tracks salaries and rates, puts the average hourly rate for a bookkeeper around $17 per hour ($10 on the low end and $24 on the high end).

Accountants rely on bookkeeping records to analyze and advise on the financial activity, health, and growth potential of a business. Bookkeepers are responsible for recording financial transactions related to the business. While most bookkeepers work with businesses, some individuals may also choose to hire a bookkeeper to track personal finances. Bookkeeping is a part of the accounting process that involves recording financial transactions. This could include how a business tracks client invoices, bills, receipts, or other purchases. Bookkeeping may also include the creation of financial statements and processing payroll.

Common Setup Mistakes

You just need to fill out a simplified application and we’ll take care of the legal formalities at a much more reasonable rate than hiring a lawyer. GitLab is a great case study for positive remote work structures and cultures. As they moved into remote working, they documented a detailed guide on approaching the challenges they faced within a remote working environment. GitLab talks about the importance of displaying your values and reinforcing them in a place where everyone can access them. Gratitude and transparency are two things that GitLab has found vital in its remote working, and they encourage showcasing those who are great cultural ambassadors. You can learn more about their building culture here when they talk about how essential intentionality is to their methods.