Posts Tagged ‘Accounting’

What is Bookkeeping?

January 30th, 2010

Some folks have created a terribly successful career in bookkeeping whereas other folks have just thought about a career in bookkeeping but have never acted on it. Bookkeeping is not the identical as accounting, this can be a common misperception. Accounting is a much larger range of financial duties and responsibilities, where bookkeeping is just one function that provides some of the basic information required for accounting.

Bookkeepers need to have a very good eye for detail, as a simple numeric error can easily report on erroneous figures that can be very hard to identify where the error is. Bookkeepers need to be very patient and methodical in their approach to their work and when required have great analysis skills to identify erroneous book entries. Bookkeepers perform all manner of record-keeping tasks and need to be flexible in their relationships with their customers, as quite often their customers do not have as much skill in bookkeeping as they do.. They prepare what are known as supply documents for all the operations of a business – the buying, selling, transferring, paying and collecting. The documents embody papers like purchase orders, invoices, credit card slips, time cards, time sheets and expense reports. Bookkeepers conjointly verify and enter in the source documents what are referred to as the money effects of the transactions and different business events. Those include paying the workers, making sales, borrowing cash or buying products or raw materials for production.

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