Guide

The question of whether to hire a bookkeeper or not has undoubtedly come into your mind as a business owner. Bookkeepers help keep your financial records organized and accurate, freeing up your time and reducing the chance of mistakes.

Once deciding to hire, it’s essential to learn how to hire a bookkeeper the right way.

This article will explore why you need a bookkeeper, their duties and essential characteristics, online platforms where you can hire one, and tips for who to hire.

Why You Need a Bookkeeper

#1. Organizing and Generating Accurate Records

A bookkeeper assists a business in keeping precise and organized records of financial transactions, such as sales, expenses, accounts payable, and more.

Having well-organized financial records allows you to take care of the financial health of your business, seeing where your income is coming from and where it’s being spent. With organized records, you can plan ahead for bill payments, fundraising, or staffing decisions.

However, maintaining organized records is just the beginning. A bookkeeper also helps produce accurate financial reports, such as balance sheets, profit and loss statements, and cash flow statements.

Every decision you make for your business will have a financial angle, and inaccurate financial records can lead to decisions that can potentially bankrupt your business.

#2. Saves You Time and Energy

Hiring a bookkeeper will take a lot of responsibilities and work off your shoulders.

Bookkeeping isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and if you’re not a numbers person, you’d have a hard time tracking business transactions.

In such cases, hiring a bookkeeper who can save you time, energy, and money is a wise decision.

#3. Can Provide Crucial Insights

A bookkeeper can review your business finances, check for discrepancies (if any), and share insights that will help you make better business decisions. They can also streamline the bookkeeping process so that you don’t face any issues during the tax season.

Responsibilities of a Bookkeeper

• Records transactions: Records daily business transactions such as sales, inventory, expenses, etc.
• Maintains accurate records: Maintains accurate transactional records and generates your balance sheet, profit and loss statement, and cash flow statement monthly.
• Reconciles accounts: Reconciles bank account and credit card statements to ensure the accuracy of your books.
• Helps with taxes: Educates you about sales and other kinds of taxes involved in your business and works in tandem with you and your tax accountant during tax season.
• Tracks performance: Assists in budget preparation, tracks business’s performance against the budget, and comes up with ideas to cut business expenses wherever possible.

Qualities to Look for In a Bookkeeper

#1. Detail-Oriented and Organized

A small mistake in a decimal point or miscounting zeros could have severe consequences for your business. It is crucial to find a bookkeeper who is detail-oriented, focused, organized, and able to correct any errors they may detect quickly.

Pro Tip: Look for a bookkeeper who is familiar with working with your type of business so that they can detect patterns in the financial records and prevent mistakes.

#2. Proficient in Using Accounting Software

Accounting software helps bookkeepers make all financial processes efficient by eliminating errors and automating repetition.

By utilizing accounting software, a bookkeeper can streamline the process of generating financial statements and eliminate the need for manual data entry in spreadsheets.

So find a bookkeeper willing to integrate accounting software into their bookkeeping process.

#3. Trustworthy

Needless to say, anyone you hire for your business must be trustworthy. But when it comes to dealing with business finances, trust is an essential quality to look for in a bookkeeper. That’s because your bookkeeper will handle crucial and delicate information that will stay between you, your business, and the bookkeeper you hire.

Places to Look to Hire a Bookkeeper

#1. Recommendations

One of the easiest and most reliable ways to hire a bookkeeper is to ask around in your network.

If you’re active on Linkedin, publish a post asking if there are any bookkeepers in your network and start talking to them.

You can also ask your network to recommend a bookkeeper they might’ve used at some point. If they’ve worked with or know of a good bookkeeper, they’ll likely be willing to pass along that person’s contact information.

#2. Upwork

Upwork is one of the most popular freelance hiring platforms. It’s trusted by the likes of Microsoft, Airbnb, Bissell, and many more.

There are two ways to hire a bookkeeper from Upwork:

• You can either post a job on the platform and wait for candidates to fill out the application
• Or you can search for bookkeepers, review their profiles, and send offers to them

The bookkeepers on Upwork charge hourly rates and the hiring costs range from $10 to $125 per hour.

#3. QuickBooks Bookkeeper

Quickbooks offers its own certified bookkeepers who will update, take care of your current financials, and create a budget for the future.

You also get personalized reports that help you make informed business decisions.

Lastly, the bookkeeper you get from QuickBooks helps you categorize transactions so that you’re all set for the tax season.

Note: QuickBooks bookkeepers work remotely and connect with you via video call.

How to Decide Who to Hire

So you have a list of potential bookkeepers who can be an excellent fit for your business. Great! But how will you decide who’s the one who will be a perfect fit?

Follow these simple steps:

Step 1: Prepare a List of Questions to Ask During the Interview

Assuming you’ve shortlisted candidates after looking at multiple options to hire a bookkeeper, ask a potential candidate the following questions to assess who can do a better job for your business.

• What’s your experience in bookkeeping so far?
• How do you stay on top of changes in accounting regulations and standards?
• What’s an example of a time when you had to deal with a difficult situation, like a discrepancy in financial records or a client issue?
• How do you keep everything organized and ensure all bookkeeping tasks are done on time?
• What specific bookkeeping software or systems have you used before? How confident are you in using them?
• How do you keep sensitive financial information, like payroll records and tax information, secure?

Add any other questions that are important to you, and keep notes of the candidate’s answers during your interviews.

Step 2: Evaluate Candidates’ Qualifications and Experience

If you already have the resumes of candidates in hand, start by looking at their qualifications.

Preferably, the candidate has a degree or certification in accounting or bookkeeping and can demonstrate a strong foundation in accounting principles and bookkeeping practices.

As far as experience is concerned, try to pick a candidate who has experience in your field of business. For example, if you’re a restaurant owner, look for a bookkeeper who has worked with a restaurant earlier. If you have a service-based business, look for someone who has done bookkeeping for other service providers.

Step 3: Check References and Conduct Background Checks

For checking references, you can contact the references provided by the candidate to verify their work history, skills, and personal qualities. You can ask questions about their job responsibilities, performance, strengths and weaknesses, and other aspects of their work.

Conducting background checks involves verifying the information provided by the candidate, including their employment history, criminal record, and education.

Next Steps

No matter your business’s industry, you need a bookkeeper to maintain and optimize business finances. If you’re financially savvy, you may be able to keep your books yourself. But even if you have a degree in accounting, as a business owner, your time is probably best spent elsewhere in your business on things like strategy.

Remember this: Don’t look at hiring a bookkeeper as another business expense. Instead, look at it as an investment. A bookkeeper will help you cut costs, optimize expenditures, and help you make the best decisions for growing your business by bringing your finances on track.

Getting a business up and running is only the beginning of your entrepreneurial quest. The business arena is in a perpetual change state which means entrepreneurs must stay on their feet to gain and maintain a competitive edge. Change is inevitable, but how can you tell that you need to make some for your business to thrive? It might not be straightforward, but you can recognize it’s time for some changes if you spot some of these tell-tale signs:

1. Poor Performance

You have objectives/goals and always measure performance to establish if the progress is on course. This is a smart model as you won’t be flying blind. You can learn from your assessments whether your business is attracting enough leads, enjoying favorable conversion rates, and retaining customers. Customers are the driving force of any business, as you need them to generate revenue.

If your business can hardly find new customers or generate repeat sales, you need to explore the reasons and make appropriate changes. Why is no one interested in your product or offers? What can you do to change the situation? Performance isn’t just about beating your competitors. It would help if you made changes that facilitate growth, especially in the long run.

2. Operational Inefficiencies

Tech is an integral part of modern businesses. Nonetheless, keeping up with the emerging trends can take a toll on your progress. Your profitability can take a blow, especially if you invest in apps/software/subscriptions that cost a lot more than they deliver. Not all solutions are made equal, and as you consider productivity, technology is among the crucial points you need to revisit. You may need to invest in a new and improved solution or downgrade to a less sophisticated and affordable option, enhancing efficiency without digging deeper into your finances.

Operational inefficiencies can derail your business progress in many ways – in addition to adding to your stress levels. Your team’s productivity takes a hit, costs increase, and your customers’ experience is affected. This emphasizes the need to ensure you are investing in practical technology solutions, not every trend that pops up.

3. Sales

Slumping sales is a clear indicator that your offers aren’t good or the pricing isn’t appropriate for your market. But also consider the cash flow and profitability to really get a whole picture of your business. Growing sales volume can be exciting, but it doesn’t automatically mean your business is thriving. For instance, are your customers readily paying the full price or only making a purchase after lengthy negotiations? You might be enjoying the growing sales, but the money isn’t there to match the volume. Moreover, you could be losing significant business as the pricing isn’t at its best.

Understanding your customers’ needs can help you learn more and make appropriate changes to your offers. You may need to revise the pricing strategy to improve the product and generate profitable sales. This translates to smooth progress, improving the sales volume, and eliminating the friction that could see your business losing a significant following.

Competitive analysis is the go-to for most entrepreneurs as they work to establish whether their business needs to make some changes. If your competitors are doing a lot better, it is only natural that you’ll want to review your business model to determine areas you need to improve. Nonetheless, this is not the only approach you can use to stay on top of your game. Considering your performance, sales profitability, and operational efficiency can help you recognize areas you need to revisit and make changes.

There are many PLR providers that sell Done-For-You Course. Sometimes it is known as a Rebrandable Course, PLR Course Bundle, etc.

Purchasing such PLR Course bundle can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you receive many different components and quite a bit of written content that you can use and sell as your own. On the other hand, you’ll need to set it all up and also rebrand the PLR so that it looks NOTHING like the original PLR you purchased.

Below are some steps that you can follow to rebrand your PLR content

1. Give the product a NEW name and buy a domain for it. The name you give your product must be catchy and interesting. You can get an idea by looking at the titles of similar books on the Amazon marketplace. Find the books that sell well and model your title after them.
2. Point the domain to your hosting nameservers
3. Hire a graphic designer on Fiverr or a minisite creation service to create a new eCover for your product, and also the images which will be used on your sales page. Remember to tell the designer to keep the image dimensions, the file name and file formats the same as what’s in the original PLR bundle
4. Once you get back all the images, substitute them for the ones provided in the PLR package. Once the old files are overwritten by the new ones, you’ll have a product that looks totally different from the original PLR.
5. Rewrite the headline that came with your PLR sales copy. While the sales copy can stay the same, rewriting the headline is important. It’s the most visible part of the sales copy and by changing it, you’ll rebrand your sales page just a bit more to differentiate your product from the original.
6. Add a buy button to the sales page. Link your sales funnel and automate the download page delivery and so on.
7. Upload the sales page, download page, and other required pages to your hosting account.
8. Set up the opt-in page provided with your PLR and link it to your autoresponder to deliver the report when people sign up. (Your opt-in report should have been rebranded too.)
9. Focus on traffic generation to the opt-in page to build your list. Have an email sequence in place to build a relationship with your subscribers.
10. Email your list and send them to the sales page you’ve set up. Start making sales!

It seems like there are so many steps involved and they seem a little technical, but the process itself is relatively straightforward. As long as you get new graphics done and rewrite the sales page headline, your product will look BRAND NEW and UNIQUE.

Any tech hiccups can be solved by searching for tutorials on YouTube. It’s all simple stuff once you follow along to the videos.

Most potential buyers do not scrutinize sales copy. They just read the headline, look at the images and see if the sales copy addresses their pain points. It’s all a superficial process.

As long as your product looks totally different from the original PLR, most potential buyers will never know that you used PLR content to create the product.

Ultimately, what matters is that the content you’re selling is good and helps the customer. If you can do that, you’ve done your part and deserve the sale.

Print out this list and keep it close to you for reference when setting up your virtual PLR box of content.

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Prievate Labels are not just about PLR content. There are so many other products that are private labeled. Here is an article about private labels for apparel.

Barneys New York Goes International With Boon the Shop
The American department-store chain has signed a wholesale deal to sell its private-label collection internationally through the pioneering South Korean retailer.

Typically manufactured by retailers and sold under their own name, have long been a staple of department stores like Barneys, where its in-house label is among the top five selling brands for men and women.

Click here to read more