The NEW Bookkeeper

I wanted to do a quick post today on the changing role of the bookkeeper. As we move forward into the third industrial revolution many jobs roles will be changing and the bookkeeper is no exception. I wanted to write this to give a little insight on where the industry is going so you know what to expect from your bookkeeper as you move forward.

Before

The 'old' profile of the bookkeeper was largely based on manual processing. Paperwork was processed by physically typing in and duplicating the paperwork on hand into an accounting system. This is a time sensitive process itself let alone all of the administrative work that centred around the handling of the paper documentation. The process of turning data into information was therefore labourious and costly as the focus is on data

After

The 'new' profile of the bookkeeper has a little bit of a different look to it. By taking full use of technology like OCRs, integrations between disperate systems using APIs whether native built or through a third party applications like Zapier the manual data entry and paper based administrative work workload can be lessoned. The results is a shift in focus of your bookkeeper to more managing data as it is transformed into information. This shift can be seen in this graphic:

As the graphic illustrates there is a 'flip in time' for the focus of the bookkeeper. The focus is now more on the information as opposed to the data. This results in more value for the business owner/employer as the bookkeeper is now more focused proactively on your business as to almost solely being focused on the processing of historical transactions.