7 Essential Skills Required to Be an Effective Bookkeeper!
There are seven essential skills you need to be a successful bookkeeper when starting a bookkeeping business. From “woo” (the ability to convince people of your skills and likeability), to grit (the ability to keep going through hardship), this list is a must-have for bookkeepers. We are essentially building our bookkeeper castle with each skill we obtain!
Watch the video here, or keep reading!
1 - Technology Skills
As a bookkeeper, you will need some technology skills to manage your clients and your business. You do not by any means have to know computer programming, but you do need to have a comfort with computers, QuickBooks, Google Docs, and video conferencing.
However, more than anything, you need to be willing to learn new programs and to persevere when the technology isn’t going your way (because that will happen!).
At some point, if not in the beginning, you will want to set up your own website to draw new clients in or to have a place for them to find out more details about the services you offer.
These technology skills are necessary for most virtual, work-from-home jobs
2 - Willingness to Learn
As a bookkeeper, you need to be willing to learn new things and learn continually. This may come in the form of taking classes for specific bookkeeping-related knowledge (such as payroll). Maybe you have a new client in an industry that you’ve never worked with before, so you need to learn more about the industry itself to be an effective bookkeeper for your client’s business.
Just like you need to have a willingness to learn, you also need to be okay not knowing everything upfront. Each client will likely bring with them new things you need to learn, and a skill you need to be good at is seeking out the answers when you don’t know them.
Another aspect of learning comes in the form of numbers. You don’t need to know super long math equations or math in great detail, but you do have to picture and understand larger numbers up to a couple million dollars depending on the clients you are working with. If you have a good, general understanding of numbers, you are good to go.
3 - You Need “Woo”
You may not have heard of this word before, but “woo” is an important quality to have as a bookkeeper. I learned about it from a personality test I took in college. “Woo” means the ability to convince others of things and to have great communication skills.
As a bookkeeper, you need to be skilled at communicating with your clients. This job is not about just sitting at your desk never speaking to anyone - at least if you are a freelance bookkeeper looking to snag more clients. You need to be skilled at overcoming your nerves when talking to clients.
In order to be an effective marketer of yourself, you need to have some “woo” or good communication skills.
RELATED: 8 Key Questions to Ask Potential Clients & New Client Questions Download
If you are nervous or if you need to hone your communication skills, my encouragement is to just keep practicing! Practice ahead of time and think about all the different scenarios that are possible and practice your responses to them. You can overcome impostor syndrome as a bookkeeper!
Not only is it important to have great communication skills to gain new clients, but you also need “woo” as you work with your current client base. Your clients are going to want to know what deadlines you are meeting, or maybe something went wrong and one of your reports is delayed. You will need effective communication to share any issues that arise with your client. This will only help your client trust and respect you and your work more.
The same goes for written communication as well: emails, texts, instant messages, etc. Ensure your communication is coming across in a professional manner.
Many bookkeepers are introverts (that’s me!), but it is important for us to be able to get a little extroverted when we communicate and to be as friendly and personable as possible when our work calls for it.
4 - Be Detail Oriented
As a bookkeeper, you are working with your clients’ finances, and you could be working with hundreds or thousands of transactions every month. Your clients are counting on you to be responsible with those transactions and to make sure each is going into the right place. They may also count on you to pay the bills and make sure you’re paying the right amount to the right vendor.
Even if you consider yourself more of a big-picture thinker, you do need to be willing to slow down and double check each detail. That’s actually one of the reasons for my business name - FinePoints - because I organize the details of my client's business.
It’s definitely possible in bookkeeping to have things go wrong or for there to be mistakes here or there, and you want to make sure you are catching those small details.
For example, maybe an expense was put in the wrong category. You need to be able to look through the details of that and make sure it is correct. Another issue that could come up is if the bank reconciliation isn’t adding up at the end of the month, so you will need to go through each transaction and figure out where the error is.
5 - Keeping Order
This word, “order,” encompasses three skills in one: being super organized, being reliable, and being dependable.
You are going to be working with a ton of aspects of your clients’ businesses that you need to keep organized. You will be working with multiple clients all in different stages of their businesses with varying types of businesses. You’ll also have documents coming in from multiple people. Different clients need specific types of reporting or invoicing, so you need to be able to keep things organized and on track for each of your clients.
Part of ‘order’ is prioritizing the most important thing. You need to be able to identify what specifically needs to be done today for each of your clients. Is anything on fire that needs to be addressed? Where do you need to work first? It’s also important to identify what you can put off if something major comes up that does need to be addressed immediately.
Keep a good calendar! Put all of the monthly deadlines that you have on your calendar. You could also use different workflow tools (I use and recommend Asana). Within Asana you can make different boards or projects for each client, and it keeps your tasks nicely organized.
Related: How I Use Asana for My Bookkeeping Workflow
Your client hired you to help them organize their business and to be another set of eyes for them so they don’t have to remember to do all of these menial, yet important, tasks. More than anything, they want you to create order in their business, and the more reliable you are and the more they can depend on you, the more valuable you become.
6 - Be a Visionary
You not only need to be a visionary for yourself, but also for your clients. It’s great if you can help them look at the big picture, work on their budget, and think about finances long-term. What are your client’s long-term goals? How can their finances and their budget meet those goals?
One way to help your clients with this long-term vision is to pull certain reports so they can really get a visual for where their business is and where it’s going. QuickBooks has so many options for reports:
You can create reports by months or by year.
You can compare numbers to last year.
You can see what open invoices there are.
You can categorize different streams of income in accounts..
There are so many different options for you as a bookkeeper to help your client be a visionary. You as a knowledgeable bookkeeper can advise your clients on how they can set up their books or what would best serve them.
Of course, in your own bookkeeping business, you also want your own vision!
What are your goals for your business?
Do you want to travel?
Do you want to work from home?
Do you want to work two days a week?
Is there a certain niche that you want to focus on?
Do you want to prioritize family time?
How can you be creative with your marketing if you want to grow your business?
For all the things in your business, you do need a visionary outlook. If you haven’t already, I recommend you take some time to answer these (and more) questions about your business.
7 - You Need Grit
I have a love/hate relationship with this word, but it is trending right now! Grit means to have determination, and even when things go wrong, you keep going.
Grit is one of the harder things for me to come to terms with because sometimes when I encounter different problems I just want to give up or I get frustrated.
Throughout your time as a bookkeeper, you are going to encounter so many different things that you don’t know how to do. When these tasks or issues come, you need to find that grit to stick it out.
You may need to figure out how to create a website or how to obtain insurance or how to set up your business legally. All of these things are potential roadblocks that you need to have the fortitude to get past.
Being a bookkeeper and starting your own business really does have so many benefits. You have such a good potential for income, but it’s not something that just happens overnight. It really requires a good amount of hard work and determination on your part. This is the case for all entrepreneurs, not just bookkeepers.
With these seven essential skills, we have built a solid foundation for our bookkeeping business.
What skills do you think are important to have in order to get started in bookkeeping?
