Your Bookkeeper and Your Accountant Do Different Jobs. Mixing Them Up Is Costing You.
Many small businesses assume one person covers everything: record the numbers, lodge the returns, give advice. When that assumption is wrong, the gap tends to show up as missed deductions, surprise tax bills and decisions made without good numbers.
What a Bookkeeper Does
Bookkeeping is about recording accurately. That generally includes:
- Entering and categorising transactions
- Reconciling bank accounts
- Raising and chasing invoices and paying bills
- Processing payroll
- Preparing BAS information
Good bookkeeping gives you clean, current records. It is the foundation for everything else.
What an Accountant Does
Accounting is about interpreting and advising. That generally includes:
- Preparing and lodging tax returns and financial statements
- Tax planning, including structure, timing and concessions
- Advising on cash flow, pricing and growth
- Representing you with the ATO
- Reviewing the books for errors and risks
An accountant is only as good as the records they work from, which is why the two roles depend on each other.
Where Businesses Get Caught
- Expecting the bookkeeper to give tax advice. A bookkeeper is not necessarily qualified or registered to give tax advice, and tax agent services have regulatory requirements of their own.
- Expecting the accountant to fix messy books for free. Cleaning up poor records takes time, and it is billed accordingly.
- Nobody owns the gap. Planning questions, such as when to buy an asset or how to time a dividend, fall between the two and never get asked.
How to Get It Right
- Be clear about who does what, in writing.
- Make sure the bookkeeper and accountant can talk to each other, ideally on the same software file.
- Ask for planning conversations, not just lodgment, from whoever handles your accounting.
RBizz provides bookkeeping and accounting under one roof, so the records and the advice sit together. Get in touch if you are unsure who is responsible for what.
