Introduction:

To understand the roles and responsibilities of a bookkeeper, it is crucial to grasp who a bookkeeper is. Bookkeepers manage the financial records of businesses by daily passage of financial transactions through the accounting system of the company. They commit to updating the financial operations by preparing reconciliations, updating statements, and entering these in the financial system of the company. Bookkeepers do not need deep knowledge of financial or management accounting as required by accountants, but just to compile data for accountants for further processing.

How do bookkeepers differ from accountants?

While bookkeepers maintain the daily financial data of business, they cannot prepare the financial reports and financial models of the business. Accountants are more advanced skilled personnel that work further on the information prepared by bookkeepers. Complex processes such as filing tax returns based on the figures prepared along with preparing the financial and management reports for other practices are the responsibilities of accountants. Accountants take information handed over by bookkeepers to the next level, presentable to the general public and the top management of the organization.

What bookkeepers do:

• Bookkeeping is producing financial records for organizations. While this is a vast area, bookkeeper’s roles and responsibilities include the following:
• Posting of invoices and bills in the bookkeeping software such as spreadsheets or some alternative offline or online accounting software such as XERO, QuickBooks, and Waveapp, etc.
• Once the invoices and bills are entered into the accounting system of the company, bookkeepers follow the status of receivables and payables from vendors and customers. They also track the delay durations of payables and receivables balances by generating reports.
• Assigning the debits and credits entries to every transaction of the company is the core responsibility of a bookkeeper. These are done by assigning a related accounting head to transactions of the business and how will these be affected by those transactions.
• While performing operations of the company, receiving cash and checks, payment of checks and cash, and preparing vouchers are the fundamental activities of the accounts department. Bookkeepers update books of the company with these activities.
• Bookkeepers generate the financial reports of the company such as balance sheets, income statements in a raw format and prepare other miscellaneous reports such as receivables and payables aging reports.
• The roles and responsibilities of bookkeepers also include checking the accuracy of figures and verifying postings of entries in the journal entries of financial transactions. If they find any discrepancies, they confirm the wrong posting and reconcile them.

The responsibilities of a bookkeeper, however, depend on the nature and size of business. In large business organizations, bookkeepers get the financial records ready in the accounting system of the company to generate reports for accountants for further processing (as described above). In a large business, there is a clear separation line in the responsibilities of accountants and bookkeepers. However, in small entities, whose operations are not cumbersome or the businesses having straight operation systems, they do not want to hire accountants because of high maintaining costs. In such small entities, bookkeepers can fulfill the responsibility of accountants. Such as in entrepreneurship, bookkeepers can generate and provide all the financial and management reports required by the owner of the business or other entities. Other than that, the advanced online accounting software such as XERO, QuickBooks, and Waveapps, etc. have approached financial accounting easy by generating one-click reports immediately usable by the management.

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