A bookkeeper plays an integral role in any business, particularly for small businesses that lack the resources to maintain their books in-house. Organizing your financial records is incredibly important after all, especially once tax season comes around, or if you urgently need a recent financial statement.
Bookkeepers can also act as strategic consultants, seeing as their statements and reports contain data that can guide your business’s future.
The team at NorthStar Bookkeeping has been delivering customized outsourced bookkeeping solutions for the past near-decade, and understands the financial stress that small business owners so often experience. We relieve your shoulders of those stress-inducing tasks and ensure your information is accurately recorded so that you can focus on running the business.
Learn about the core duties of a bookkeeper, why they’re critical for any business, and how NorthStar helps SMB owners reach financial peace of mind.
What Does a Bookkeeper Do?
A bookkeeper is a finance professional who helps businesses keep their finances organized and records daily financial transactions, including purchases, expenses, revenues, invoices, and payments. As a business owner, you also lean on your bookkeeper for financial reports and trial balances to assist your accountants. Bookkeepers can also lend a hand with payroll, collecting debts, making payments, and producing invoices.
On a broader scale, bookkeepers are expected to provide accurate, up-to-date financial data that business owners can use to guide major decisions, making them integral for strategy development.
Let’s dive into the details of bookkeeper duties and see how their actions feed into a business’s operations and bottom line.
Maintains Organized Financial Records
One of the primary responsibilities of a bookkeeper is maintaining a company’s financial records in an organized, easily accessible manner.
This includes recording all transactions, from sales and purchases to receipts and payments, into the general ledger. Bookkeepers classify transactions by using a chart of accounts and ensure that entries follow generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP).
Financial organization is crucial for any business since maintaining well-organized records makes it easier for business owners to find their financial statements and tax documents without having to shuffle through drawers and cabinets in a panic.
Prepares Financial Statements
Bookkeepers also produce regular financial statements based on the company’s transactions, including income statements, balance sheets, statements of retained earnings, and cash flow statements.
If you’re considering outsourcing your bookkeeping, your bookkeeper will compile trial balances and closing entries to generate accurate financial statements. These documents allow for visibility into a company’s financial health and performance over a set period, giving business owners valuable data to strategize with for future months.
Performs Bank Reconciliations
Another core bookkeeping duty is reconciling the company’s bank and credit accounts against financial records either monthly, or biweekly. Reconciling accounts ensures that transactions are recorded correctly and allows companies to identify discrepancies, errors, or any suspicious activities that require correction.
Ultimately, performing bank reconciliations protects your business against potential fraud or loss of funds. In this way, your bookkeeper is your financial guardian against costly errors and mishaps.
Delivers Financial Reports
While accountants handle taxes and audits, bookkeepers deliver useful financial reports to management frequently. Standard reports that your bookkeeper will provide include:
- Income and expense reports
- Accounts receivable aging reports
- Profit and loss statements
- Trial balances
These reports and statements are important for any business since they glean the financial insights necessary to shift and pivot your business strategy. Your bookkeeper can also customize reports to display the metrics and data that are most relevant to your business, depending on your industry and vertical.
Provide Financial Data for Strategy Development
Your bookkeeper has a wide set of niche duties, as you can see. But on a broader scale, bookkeepers enable data-driven business decisions by providing you with accurate, up-to-date financial information that speaks volumes about your business’s current state and future priorities.
Leadership relies on bookkeeping records and reports to analyze performance across products, services, and departments, and make strategic decisions regarding expansions, investments, budgets, and much more.
This renders your bookkeeper a strategic consultant of sorts, one that informs your business’s future with accurate data and the insights that follow.
Attain Financial Clarity with NorthStar Bookkeeping
At NorthStar Bookkeeping, we’ve delivered remote bookkeeping services with in-house results for the past near-decade, helping small and mid-sized businesses streamline their accounting functions and taking financial stress off of their shoulders.
We carry out bookkeeping, financial reporting, and accounting consultation services for small businesses throughout California and beyond. NorthStar’s outsourced bookkeeping services include:
- Bookkeeping Clean-Up
- Business Accounting
- Bank & Credit Card Reconciliations
- Accounts Payable & Receivable
- Payroll Processing
- General Ledger Data Entry
- Customized Financial Reporting
- Month-End Closing
- Fiscal year-End Support
- Accounting Advisory
- Quickbooks Training & Support
Make NorthStar Your Dedicated Bookkeeper
NorthStar Bookkeeping is the partner you need. By entrusting your bookkeeping and back-end administration to a responsive and responsible partner, you’ll free up your working hours for the tasks that only you can do.
And it’s safe to say that your accounts will be more up-to-date and accurate with NorthStar’s team of experts overseeing them than they were when you were trying to do everything yourself.
Choose NorthStar Bookkeeping for peace of mind and confidence that you will achieve financial clarity.