5 Ways You're Frustrating Your Bookkeeper

So you hired an accountant or bookkeeper to maintain your monthly accounting. It’s a smart move, especially if you don’t like doing it yourself, don’t have the time to do it, or accounting isn’t your area of expertise. A bookkeeper’s main job is to keep your books in order and give you timely and accurate financial statements. Are you unknowingly getting in the way of that? Here’s five things you might be doing that could be frustrating your bookkeeper.

You don’t give them your bank and credit card statements. To close a month, the first task that must be completed is reconciling all bank and credit card accounts. This ensures that all transactions have been recorded and no transactions have been duplicated. It also identifies any uncashed checks or other uncleared activity. Your bookkeeper needs to know the beginning and ending balances of your accounts to accomplish that. In order to know that, statements are an absolute must. It’s difficult to go forward with closing the month without performing reconciliations first.

You don’t answer all their questions. Invariably, you’ll get questions about transactions or other issues. If you’re receiving questions, there’s a very good reason why you are. Your bookkeeper is not trying to make your life difficult. He or she might need additional information to confirm transactions are recorded properly, ensuring your month-end financials are accurate. By nature, accountants don’t like to guess on things, and they usually won’t. Unanswered questions can delay the closing process and, in turn, will require additional communication and take up more of everyone’s time. If your accountant bills by the hour, it could even cost you more.

You give answers like “I don’t know” or “I think…". If you can’t give concrete answers about your business, your bookkeeper certainly won’t be able to either. Vague answers yield vague results. Your financial statements tell a story about your business. Are you making money? Are you growing? Are your expenses growing faster than your revenue? Are you spending too much in a certain area? If guesses and assumptions have to be made in order to produce those statements, that story might become distorted.

You don’t save all your receipts. An accountant would rather you have a shoebox full of all your receipts versus scanned copies of most of your receipts. Incomplete information is just that…incomplete. And again, that situation can force guessing. If you don’t provide your bookkeeper with any receipts, which isn’t that uncommon of a scenario, be prepared for questions. If you can’t answer a question about an expense because you don’t have the receipt, you’ll end up saying “I don’t know” or “I think…”. See previous paragraph. Besides, you’ll need those receipts (or scans of them) in case of an audit.

You don’t ask questions. Some business owners partially handle their accounting by entering the day-to-day transactions. The bookkeeper then performs the closing tasks and financial statement review at month-end. If you have that kind of arrangement and you’re not sure how to record an unusual transaction, ask. If you don’t and end up recording things improperly, your bookkeeper will find it. In turn, more questions, more corrections, more time, and possibly more billable hours.

Like any relationship, communication is essential. And, it is a two-way street. Your accountant should be communicating with you too. You are relying on your accountant to give you the technical expertise you need and your accountant is relying on you for accurate data. After all, no one knows your business like you do.