If you’ve been thinking about changing careers and trying something new, becoming a bookkeeper could be a great job for you. However, before you get started with this process, there are a few things that you’ll want to think about so that you’re able to ensure that you’ll love this career path and find happiness and success in this type of work.
To help you know if going down a career path toward bookkeeping is a good idea for you, here are three things to consider before becoming a bookkeeper.
How Well Your Skills Align
Different careers are going to best align with different skill sets, and being a bookkeeper is no different. While many people can learn to become a bookkeeper regardless of the skills and abilities they have, if you naturally have certain tendencies or your brain works in certain ways with numbers and organization, working as a bookkeeper could be an ideal career for you.
To know if this is the case for you, consider if you have skills like being well organized and having great attention to detail, as this is what you’ll need to be a good bookkeeper. You’ll also need to work well with numbers and tell if something is off with calculations. Using spreadsheets and being effective at data entry can also help you be a great bookkeeper. And if you understand invoicing and can solve problems related to many financial business issues, any company is going to be happy to hire you as a bookkeeper for them.
If You’ll Freelance
As was mentioned above, being a bookkeeper can help you get a job at all kinds of businesses where bookkeeping is a necessity: which is basically all of them. However, you might not be interested in working as a bookkeeper for any one business. Rather than going this route, you can be a freelance bookkeeper and work for different businesses.
If you want to freelance as a bookkeeper, you’ll need to make sure that you set your business up correctly, as you could run into legal issues if you don’t. You’ll also want to consider learning about marketing yourself and your business in addition to doing your training as a bookkeeper so that you’ll always have the amount of business you want to keep yourself busy.
To Become Certified Or Not
You can learn a lot about being a bookkeeper by taking classes and gaining experience. But if you want to be a salaried bookkeeper or you’re wanting to stand out in the freelance bookkeeping business, you may want to consider getting certified.
To get certified as a bookkeeper, you need to work as a bookkeeper for about two years and then take the certification exam. You will also need to commit to being an ethical bookkeeper and being transparent in your work.
If you’ve been thinking about becoming a bookkeeper and want to know if the training, effort, and education is going to be worth it for you, consider using the tips mentioned above to help you in making this career decision.
