Diversify – is one of the slogans that pops up. Offer more than only bookkeeping – business analysis, cash flow, budgeting. But guess what, accountants are all over that – and they have education and systems ready to go.
Where does that leave the bookkeepers?
Get out of the industry? But when you built up a client base with your heart and sweat and kept up with regular professional education – that’s a lot of investment to just give up. On top of that bookkeeping is one of the industries that can be done 100% from home and most qualified BAS agents are stay-at-home mums turned self employed.
There is a solution that is staring us straight in the eyes.
Small businesses are dissatisfied by lack of service or unaffordability of the service they would need. Yes, accountants are offering to do their books and software is promising to automate transactions – all that to save money – but they don’t get any insights anymore. The custom small business operators that opened their business within the last 3 years are now equipped with modern cloud accounting software and various add-ons, like payment portals, rostering and time keeping software, online shops, customer relationship management software, and the list goes on.
But do these systems actually tell them how business is performing?
No.
Data is only as good as the connectors that lead to a result.
Data in itself is like white noise that somebody else is excited about. It’s like when you get told by an excited scientist that these specific noises, that are only crackles in your ears, mean that there is a species around that nobody has heard of and you are just standing there – it does not make any sense to you.
What the market needs right now is translators. Bookkeepers are trained in understanding this white noise, they can take the books of clients and give them insights into their performance – timely, relevant and accurate. Making sense of the cacophony of information that gives clients a headache – this is the new bookkeeping.
Operational accounting – the art of keeping your books in order for the purpose of business insights – is actually how it all began, it’s not a new invention. The merchants of Venetia in the 15th century used the revolutionary concept of double-entry accounting to gain more control over their dealings with less errors. It was not invented for the king to collect taxes upon.
This market is huge, it is a pool of fish that jump in your net without any big effort – let’s get back to your roots and be a bookkeeper!