Why Small Businesses Make Great Clients for Bookkeepers

If you’re getting started as a bookkeeper, some well-meaning people may have told you to look for established, larger businesses as clients. They’ve likely said something like, “Those kinds of companies have deep pockets and they’ll be around for a while,” to justify why they think bigger businesses make better clients.

Truth is, bigger is not always better.

Once you’ve completed your bookkeeping program or have taken bookkeeping courses online in Canada, you already know which are your favourite parts of the job and which are the parts that you’d rather limit or skip altogether. You’ve also likely learned about that some of the tasks of a bookkeeper can be a fulltime job in a large company.

Perhaps, when you completed your bookkeeping program, you found that there was one part of the job you absolutely loved and want to do day in and day out. There might be something about accounts receivable that simply makes your day better. If that’s the case, looking for a larger business might be the right choice for you. They will have larger accounting teams and can allow for a number of specialists.

However, if you prefer to be more of a generalist where you perform a number of different bookkeeping tasks each day, you’ll likely want to focus on smaller companies and even some startups. While bigger organizations have individuals doing their unique part of the necessary accounting tasks, smaller operations need someone who can help them look at the full accounting picture.

Whether you took online bookkeeping certificate programs or through an in-class format, there’s no doubt you learned about software like QuickBooks, Sage and FreshBooks. These, and your accounting brain, are the tools that will allow you to become an important partner to small business people. These businesses need bookkeepers. They are hair salon owners, architects and spirits distillers. They know their business, but they don’t know bookkeeping – and they can be great clients.

-       You can still specialize. Sure, earlier in this blog we established that specialists tend to work for larger companies, but there are definitely exceptions. For one, you might want to be a bookkeeper that takes on the full range of accounting for some of your clients, but you might also want to become a specialist in taxes.

     

      This allows you the ability to focus on something you really enjoy while also giving you the flexibility to practice all aspects of accounting. Additionally, because you have the choice to take on more work or drop some work, you’ll be able to decide what balance is best for you.

      Along these lines of specialization, there is another way you can take your bookkeeping business into a niche area. That’s by focusing on specific types of businesses rather than on how much or what types of work you do for them. If you’ve always been fascinated by the entertainment industry, maybe you want to be the bookkeeper who works with playhouses, recording studios, artists and authors. If you want to know what goes on behind the scenes of a candy company, maybe you’ll be specializing in high-end food and beverage clients.

      It’s up to you if you want to provide accounting services to “any business” and what those services will look like.

-        Another reason to focus on smaller businesses that you may have learned in your bookkeeping courses online in Canada is that you get to play a part in growing and seeing those businesses thrive. Tasks like budgeting, payroll and inventory analysis simply aren’t in the wheelhouse of most small business owners and managers. They need a bookkeeper on their team to help them create plans, reports and data that help them, in turn, create an amazing business and you can say that you were a key player in seeing that happen.

-       There are some business owners and managers who are ridiculously organized and there are others who couldn’t find their shoes to tie them. Both are going to need the expertise of a bookkeeper to keep them on track. You will help them stay organized by sending reminders of things that need to be done, what’s upcoming and helping them find the documentation and data you need to put their records together correctly the first time rather than fixing what’s incorrect.

-        Every business owner knows to look at their sales to see how things are going, but is that the full picture of what’s happening in the business? You of course know, from your bookkeeping program, that sales is just one part of the picture, but many business owners and managers don’t know what else to look at. They also don’t know how to interpret certain reports placed in front of them. They need balance sheets, income statements, P&L reports, accounts payable reports, etc. to see the big picture, but if they don’t understand what the columns and numbers mean, they will be lost and guessing as to whether their business is performing as well as they would like or not.

      This is where a bookkeeper can provide a great amount of value. Because numbers are something you love, you are able to help the business owner or manager better understand the financial picture of the business and see decisions can be made to enhance that picture. For example. You may advise hiring a full time employee in the warehouse to serve as a supervisor because there is unexplained loss from what should be in inventory. The business owner or manager’s reaction could have initially been that they don’t want to pay a supervisory salary but prefer another college student’s wage. Without knowing the unexplained loss piece of the puzzle, that increased salary wouldn’t have made sense. With it, the loss may disappear and cover the increased salary as well as bringing about greater efficiencies in the warehouse.

As a bookkeeper, you have the ability to decide how much or how little of the accounting role you want to take on. If you prefer working in a larger team and managing one particular aspect of the role, bigger businesses may be the right fit for you. If you’d rather manage more of a complete accounting picture and create your own specializations within that, you will want to look to smaller businesses – they can make great clients.