My least-favorite to most-favorite bookkeeping services (ranked!)

hey guys today I'm ranking my very worst bookkeeping tasks the ones I hate all the way to my very favorite bookkeeping tasks I wasn't actually sure if I should start with the worst or start with the best but I decided to start with the worst so number 25 my least favorite bookkeeping task because I do not do it is preparing taxes and so as I'm counting down from number 25 the worst to number one my favorite I do have some videos about certain of these topics like invoicing for example I have a whole video just about invoicing and so I'm going to put a little asterisk in the like title when I mention it so then you can find that video on my channel if you're interested it was a lot so I didn't really want to link them all in the description box but definitely go find that video just search it in my channel if you're interested in more info so you'll sense a theme the worst few are things I have chosen not to do not to learn that maybe they're not that bad but I just have made a choice not to do them so like I said that is preparing taxes and then I also put sales tax in there because in Oregon we don't actually don't have sales tax and I've never had a client that has a point of sale where they have to do sales tax so I don't know how to do that actually which is kind of weird probably to some of you also tracking inventory that is something I've never done for a client I've chosen not to take clients that track inventory it just seems very tedious to me I did learn how to do it like in a class one time but I'm not really that interested in doing it as a bookkeeper all right and counting down then number 22 is Big cleanups so if a bookkeeping client comes to me and their books are like totally messed up totally terrible that is not one of my favorite things to do is clean up the books and get them back to normal usually have to do some cleaning up when I have a new client you know that could take me 1 hour it could take me 5 hours but I've had to do cleanups that take me like a month sometimes and that just really I find overwhelming like it's hard to know where to start it feels like you're doing all this work and then I get stressed that it's like costing the client a lot of money and so it is definitely not my favorite thing to do and next on the list comes receipt management and kind of going along with that is number 20 is organizing paperwork so I hate it anytime someone gives me like a big box of paperwork and I'm supposed to either input that into QuickBooks or into a spreadsheet or something or anytime I have to pull any data off of a piece of paper I hate doing that I'd much rather like you you know download a spreadsheet an Excel spreadsheet off their bank and then upload it into QuickBooks or find like a more digital way to do things and I will say if you're a little newer to bookkeeping this list is like in weird order like there's no kind of Rhyme or Reason I just started listing the 25 things in order of like how I dislike them to how I like them but if you look at this list right here this is actually a more organized list of bookkeeper services and I do have a dedicated video just on these services and it follows a more like linear pattern if you watch that video so for the first three that are green on this table I call level one those are just like the basic bookkeeping tasks so categorizing reconciling sending reports and then the middle section is kind of like a little like another step up maybe you can add these Services little by little and that's paying bills invoicing and cleanups and then as you figure out what you're doing a little bit more you can move on to doing things like inventory and payroll so I actually just today made a playlist with that video along with like a few other videos that talk about Services you can provide as a bookkeeper so I did like what's the number one service you couldn't start with and then I did you know how to add a service and stuff like that so you can check out that playlist here are a few of the videos that are on it but if you're trying to figure out more like what is this bookkeeper thing all about those videos are probably going to be a little more helpful than this one because it's more linear this is just like a big list and my personal preferences all right and getting back to the list number 19 is making bank deposits so sometimes as a bookkeeper I do have to actually go to the bank with like cash or checks and do a bank deposit it's not the worst thing in the world sometimes I guess it's kind of nice to get out of the office I find it to be kind of a waste of time and those kind of tend to be clients that are maybe less into digital options like I think usually you can not cash but you can like you know do check images and stuff anyways I don't love going to the bank number 18 is recording things to depreciate I don't really know how to do this usually I get help from a CPA for this depending on the client sometimes CPAs want to know you know what is being depreciated like big assets and this is a good time to mention I'm a bookkeeper not an accountant not a tax preparer not a CPA so I don't have as much much training as some of those people that are more specialized and my name is Morgan my website is finep points. Biz subscribe to my channel if you want a bookkeeper video every week and I am curious leave me a comment and let me know what is your favorite bookkeeping task or if you have one that's vastly different than mine or like if you hate my top five let me know I'm actually really interested in what tasks you like as a bookkeeper and give this video a thumbs up if you are ready to hear the last 17 of these number 17 is fixing things on the balance sheet and number 16 is creating journal entries so these kind of fall under the category of things I'm not as confident with I think sometimes that's a big piece of either liking something or not liking it if you feel like you don't know how to do it then it's not very fun and I've had instances with this even in like Corporate America I have a really specific example of I hated this one part of my job I hated it I worked in merchandising so it was like having to reduce prices I hated that part and then eventually I decided I'm just going to learn everything everything I need to know about the strategy for this one thing and then you know over the course of a year I really educated myself about that I worked with my team on it and then I actually kind of became an expert in that one thing and then I was able to help out actually other people in the district and kind of teach about that thing so that was a really good lesson to me that if you invest a lot of time into something often it becomes more enjoyable so fixing things on the balance sheet and then creating journal entries I can do both of those often times I feel like I know how I want it to look so for example one time I I input a loan as a liability and then every time we made a payment to the loan I would put it you know in that category and it was working and working and then at the end it didn't balance out to zero and I was like dang it like I know it needs to balance but because of a series of like extraneous circumstances it wasn't working and then I had to do a journal entry to fix it and I actually had someone help me do that journal entry so I made sure to do it right but making journal entries I can do simple ones but often I have accountant help me if it's something kind of confusing and or trying to fix something with a journal entry it's always nice to get another set of eyes on that all right number 15 and number 14 are finding new clients and onboarding new clients so I actually used to hate these I used to hate like having to network and having to go out and find clients one good thing about a bookkeeper is once you have your max like maybe you just want 10 clients and that's all the time you have then you don't necessarily have to keep marketing forever but over time I've really like kind of honed in my networking ability and my marketing ability and I'm able to talk about my business and kind of explain more clearly what I do so I will do a Shameless plug here I made a class all about bookkeeper marketing so if you are looking for more bookkeeping clients definitely check that out there's a free Master Class you can take kind of as an intro also that gives you a taste of the class so I'm going to link that down below the free master class is called how I got my first three clients and then the longer course is called bookkeeper marketing coach so we're kind of hanging out in the middle group of things I like okay now the next one number 13 is yearend stuff so kind of like close closing up the books year end and for a while I kind of like didn't know if I was doing this correctly I did make a video about that so you can check out that with kind of like what yearend closing is a lot of it you're kind of doing as you go along so if you're doing it if you're keeping up on it there's not that much to do at year end so I kind of like that now 12 is recording meals so some meals are deductible at 50% and some are deductible at 100% depending on like what type of party the business is having so I was kind of like annoyed and confused by that for many years but then again I figured out a system and now I really enjoy it so I just have two categories in QuickBooks most of the meals are the 50% deduction and then if I can tell it's a larger amount or if I know that they just had a Christmas party or something I will put that in the 100% And if I'm not sure I'll just shoot a quick email or a spreadsheet to my client and ask them for sure number 11 is small cleanups so I don't really mind small cleanups I talk about that I do not love giant ones but small ones are fine number 10 is payroll and I will say this is payroll with a payroll company this one is kind of hard but I like it when it works usually I use the payroll company Gusto and I sink Gusto into QuickBooks and I really like that because it creates a journal entry for me automatically and then at the end of the year usually my accountant is like your payroll is balancing perfectly and that's because it's you know just feeding from Gusto but as long as there aren't too many issues I do find payroll fun now I put bill pay and invoicing as numbers nine and 10 I think Bill Pay is a little bit easier but I also don't find it as necessary so usually that's just like collecting bills from all the vendors and then paying them I had a client where I had to print out checks for each vendor that was not the best but usually if you're just paying them online that's pretty easy so bill pay number nine invoicing I think this is a little bit harder but it's also kind of fun so it's you know and it can be like very complex or very simple so usually it's just creating an invoice for one of your client clients so if you're working for a veterinarian it is going to be the dog owner that you are invoicing and then when the dog owner pays that invoice you record it in QuickBooks so I do get some satisfaction from you know like marking this invoices paid or pulling reports to see how much outstanding money is out there and following up on invoices so I think that's a good solid number eight all right number seven I put as fixing client pain points so I really love doing this it's very satisfying and especially involves like listening to what your client is telling you is their pain point and then thinking of a creative solution and then implementing it and often times there's a lot of appreciation when you do that for someone so one example of this is I had a client I was doing medical billing for so a lot of it was working with insurance companies and it kind of ended up being a lot of having to call insurance companies and follow up to see if things were covered and I kind of helped the business owner come up with a better system for this and it actually involved hiring another person to do that cuz she was paying me to do it at a bookkeeper rate but really she could you know have more of like an office assistant type person do that so I helped her actually find a person that I knew that could do it well and then onboard and hire that person so that was like a paino that we work together to fix and I just feel like anytime you're helping out these business owners your clients like that is so much value added to them number six is categorizing so in that bank tab or Bank feeds area of QuickBooks just categorizing all the transactions that is like the bread and butter the kind of basic bookkeeping tasks and if you hate doing that I don't know if being a book Keepers for you it is kind of tedious it can be a little boring sometimes and I'm not going to say I love it every day but overall I do find it pretty like easy and satisfying and there's a lot of AI now that automatically like learns like where things go so that is really helpful as well all right and now we're into the top five of my favorite bookkeeping things hopefully you're excited number five is organizing the chart of accounts and when I read this I was like o maybe I should put this higher cuz I really like doing this I don't know this I think this is kind of a weird thing that I do maybe more than other people but I love looking at the profit and loss statement and figuring out how it's going to like look the best and how it's going to function the best and this can vary a lot client to client and some clients are going to have you know are going to want it a certain way or they'll have opinions but often times they don't care and I'm pretty good at like sorting things in a way that make sense to people so after I've been working with a client for like a year and kind of know their business I'll make either small tweaks or or large tweaks depending on what is needed so just like a small example is for one of my clients I separated out their annual expenses from their monthly expenses because it was getting confusing with the annual expenses because they had like five things that they would pay like $10,000 like one month and then it's like you're like why so then it kind of like pulls those away from the monthly expenses so then the monthly expenses stay more consistent it's like rent and like different utilities and then so it's kind of like consistent and then you can see that annual expenses more clearly wow the sun just came out from behind a cloud so hopefully that's not too distracting but maybe it is a good om for my last few so number four is sending reports I really like sending reports to clients I like thinking about the data that they will need to make their decisions and you know sending the right report so maybe they want to know how much you know salary they've taken out so I'd go to the balance sheet and find owner draws and send them a report of owner's draws or maybe I'm like oh you've been spending a lot on Advertising here's a report of every that you've spent on Advertising like is there anything that you want to tweak at all for this honestly typically I'm just sending a profit and loss and a balance sheet but if there's any other extra things I find that fun number three is reconciling the bank account because it's so satisfying when that top number says zero which means it's all balanced out and you're good to go and you can click reconcile love that I do hate it when it when there's a problem and it does not reconcile that's terrible number two is creating systems so this is kind of similar to that other one I said that was like fixing the paint pain points but systems I find even more enjoyable because it's like creating like a workflow that is efficient for my clients so This Is How We Do Bank deposits this is how we record them this is the information I need in QuickBooks you know sometimes there's multiple people involved that all need different information so creating a system I find really satisfying and my number one favorite thing about being a bookkeeper is analyzing reports so I did kind of touch on this in the sending reports one but it is looking at all the financial data for my client and you know making suggestions or pointing things out that they might not see or you know if they have a really bad month like a really you know if they're losing money one month then I can look go through the report and analyze it and see like why did we lose money because oh we have these like big expenses next year maybe if you want things to be like more leveled out then we could pay these expenses in different months or maybe there's one category that's really high your rent is really high it's a higher percentage than we would like to see you know for your business like are we able to maybe subas some of those you know offices out or does it make sense to possibly move buildings I know that's a pretty big one but you know anytime I can I feel like I have a very close look at the finances a close look at the books even more so you know than my clients do because I'm looking at every single transaction and I'm categorizing every single thing so I think even though I'm not trained as like CFO I do have a valuable opinion and I'm able ble to share that with clients so don't forget to tell me in the comments what your favorite parts are about being a bookkeeper I'm interested to hear all right I will talk to you guys again next week thanks

Channel: FinePoints

Views: 3,711

Keywords: work from home business, bookkeeper, bookkeeping, start a bookkeeping business, low-cost business idea, be a bookkeeper, how to start bookkeeping, bookkeeper services

Id: da3wzaYxkZM

Length: 15min 9sec (909 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 26 2024