The Most Important Bookkeeping Skills (With Examples)

Bookkeepers play an essential role in any business organization by recording accounting transactions and issuing important financial statements.

Their work helps to provide company owners and managers with the data to make key decisions that they wouldn’t be able to make without.

Bookkeeping can also be an extremely lucrative position for many professionals, as it’s relatively high-paying despite often not requiring a college degree.

In this article, we’ll discuss the nine most important skills for prospective bookkeepers to have. By mastering the skills on this list, you’ll set yourself ahead of the competition at any bookkeeping job interview.

What Is the Difference Between Accounting and Bookkeeping?

There’s often confusion regarding the difference between a bookkeeper and an accountant, so we should clarify before moving any further.

Bookkeepers are responsible for the initial recording of their organization’s financial transactions.

Their priorities are to maintain consistency in how they record financial data and to make sure it’s accurate.

Accountants come in after this initial process. Their job is to examine the raw data and use it for many purposes, such as for:

• Interpretation

• Classification

• Analysis

• Reporting

• Summarizing

Compared with bookkeepers, accountants are more focused on contextualizing financial data and making sense of it.

Once accountants neatly polish data and make it easily digestible, it’s then passed onto management to inform their decision-making process.

The 9 Most Important Bookkeeping Skills

The nine most important skills to master and include on your resume for a bookkeeping position are:

1. Organization. As the number one purpose of employing bookkeepers is to maintain accurate and readable financial records, organizational skills are the most important type of skill for you to have.

   Even at a medium-sized company, you’ll often be inundated with large volumes of data to organize and record.

   People from different departments will also frequently ask you multiple questions each day, so you must stay mentally organized as well.

2. Attention to detail. The financial data that accountants analyze and managers base their decisions on, starts with you, the bookkeeper.

   It’s important to make sure the raw data is correct and isn’t missing any critical parts so that you don’t misrepresent the company’s status to other staff.

   You should also be aware of which types of details are important to record, and which are irrelevant.

   This may vary depending on your company’s industry, as well as on the specific company.

3. Communication. A common misconception is that bookkeepers rarely need to interact with other company staff, as all they need is to work with numbers and analytical tasks.

   However, the vast majority of your work as a bookkeeper will be communicating with others.

   You’ll need to:

   • Ask questions to find out exactly what types of financial data needs to be recorded.

   • Speak with whoever you need to gather the actual data.

   • Cross-reference with others to validate the data.

   • Answer the many questions that co-workers will inevitably ask you.

   This communication may occur face-to-face or digitally through writing. In either case, you’ll need to be able to clearly communicate and work well with others.

   This skill is also critically important if you want to transition your bookkeeping into any other office career, such as being a receptionist or administrator.

4. Transparency and integrity. As countless company staff will be basing their decisions on your work, it’s imperative to stay committed and honest.

   Much of the data you deal with will also be strictly confidential and financial, meaning you’ll need to respect all policies set in place to protect it.

   We also can’t stress enough how often you’ll need to answer other peoples’ questions as a bookkeeper. You’ll most often be speaking with accountants and other bookkeepers, but may also work with auditors.

   It’s important to remain honest, transparent, and as helpful as possible throughout the entire process.

5. Problem-solving. It’s another common misconception that bookkeepers perform very little analysis and problem-solving, as those are the main tasks of accountants.

   In the world of finance, however, you’ll run into many problems that you’ll have to figure the solutions to yourself.

   These include:

   • Data inconsistencies. Bookkeepers need to be able to spot issues, not just mindlessly record transactions.

     If the company is debited a strange amount or anything else seems unusual, it will be on you to find out why.

     The party that you pass your data on will work with it assuming that what you’ve recorded is correct, so you need to make sure that’s always the case.

   • Gathering data. Depending on the nature of your company and how it conducts business, how you gather data may differ.

     It may also differ between departments and various other factors. For one type of transaction, you may need to gather data from a sales official.

     For others, you might need to consult an automated system or even reach out to the client. It will be your job in most cases to figure it out.

6. Technology skills. While decades ago all bookkeepers worked solely with physical ledgers and paper documents, these days most organizations use various software tools.

   You’ll need to build proficiency with the latest and most popular bookkeeping software and related technical tools.

   It’s also important to have general tech-savviness, in case you’re ever confronted with the software you’ve never used and need to learn quickly.

   As bookkeepers frequently need to communicate with others and answer questions, you’ll also need to learn how to use common communication software such as Zoom, Slack, and Outlook.

   This is especially important if you’re pursuing a bookkeeping position during the coronavirus pandemic, as most offices are working remotely and relying on team communication software.

7. Time-management. As a bookkeeper, you’ll constantly be met with deadlines, priorities, and long lists of related activities to complete.

   Without excellent time management skills, you’ll struggle to balance all your tasks with a limited number of hours each day.

   Many effective bookkeepers rely on time-management strategies to help them budget their time.

   A few key tried-and-true methods include:

   • Time blocking. Time blocking is a time-management strategy where you divide the time you have to work into many chunks, and then assign the tasks and activities you need to finish among those chunks.

     This method is effective because when we’re given long deadlines, we tend to put off certain tasks until the very end.

     By establishing short timeframes we can instill a sense of urgency that forces us to use our time more efficiently and procrastinate less.

   • Important-urgent matrix. Create a 2×2 matrix and label one axis as “important” and “less important,” and the other axis as “urgent” and “not urgent.”

     Next, fill in the matrix with the tasks that you need to accomplish.

     You’ll now have four quadrants that conveniently display the order in which you should prioritize tackling your duties.

     Target the tasks that are both important and urgent first and end with the items that are labeled less important and not urgent.

   • Getting Things Done (GTD). The GTD method works by making you break down all the tasks you need to complete into smaller, more actionable items. This allows you to spend less time thinking and more time jumping in and working.

     Take out a piece of paper and write down anything you need to complete. Use a simple action statement, such as “respond to Bob’s email.”

     Anything that isn’t a simple action statement, break it down into smaller tasks until it is. Now that you have a list of what you need to do, you can simply go and execute it.

8. Mathematical and technical bookkeeping skills. The exact technical and mathematical skills you’ll use as a bookkeeper depend on the type and size of the company.

   However, there are several key skills you’re likely to need to matter where you work as a bookkeeper.

   These include:

   • Basic arithmetic. Although you’ll rarely use any math skills more complex than just basic arithmetic, you better be extremely proficient with the math you do use since they’ll be required every single day.

   • Calculator skills. At the very least, you should know how to use an electronic calculator.

     It’s also useful to learn how to use a physical 10-key calculator, as some companies still use legacy manual accounting systems.

   • Electronic spreadsheets. You’ll very likely use Microsoft Excel every single day as a bookkeeper, even if you’re working at a small business.

     You don’t need how to use more advanced features such as pivot tables or VBA.

     However, you should be able to create basic spreadsheets for common requirements such as listing a group of fixed assets or maintaining the details of an account.

   • Common bookkeeping tasks. A few important bookkeeping functions you’ll need to learn how to fulfill include:

     1. Issuing invoices for clients

     2. Paying bills

     3. Recording inventory

     4. Calculating and tracking employee pay

     5. Creating financial statements

     6. Preparing journal entries

9. Memory. It’s important to have excellent mental memory skills and to develop a habit of recording all details that seem notable.

   You’ll often be confronted with problems that require you to recall figures, procedures, and other items.

   It’s also important to keep records of everything on-hand when co-workers approach you with questions so that you can answer with little hesitation.

Author

Chris Kolmar

Chris Kolmar is a co-founder of Zippia and the editor-in-chief of the Zippia career advice blog. He has hired over 50 people in his career, been hired five times, and wants to help you land your next job. His research has been featured on the New York Times, Thrillist, VOX, The Atlantic, and a host of local news. More recently, he's been quoted on USA Today, BusinessInsider, and CNBC.