Bad Bookkeepers: The Five Top Traits

By Will Mattheus


The purpose of this article isn't to instruct you how to be bad at your work if you become a bookkeeper. With that being said, acknowledging and learning something from your errors is really important in order to become more effective in any career field, and learning from others' errors has the additional advantage of not having to make the mistakes yourself to begin with! In the following paragraphs, we are going to talk about the top 5 characteristics of a bad bookkeeper, and you can quickly learn how to be a better bookkeeper by avoiding them.

1. They Are Disorganized

A bad bookkeeper will lose supporting financial documentation for transaction, lose and forget about bills that are outstanding, forget about delivering invoices to clientele who owe the company money, and perpetually forget to carry out regular and major tasks, e.g. bank reconciliations and financial reporting. A bad bookkeeper lacks a deliberate document filing system. A bad bookkeeper doesn't have a specific day-after-day work-flows and schedules to help them remain on the top of their continuing important work.

2. They Don't Understand the Importance of 100% Accuracy.

"It almost adds up, so it's probably good enough" is what a bad bookkeeper is going to tell the manager instead of going back and making sure the books are truly accurate. A bad bookkeeper will record transactions to the completely wrong accounts, and for the wrong amount. A bad bookkeeper is never meticulous about recording monetary transactions exactly as they actually happened.

3. They Gossip

A bad bookkeeper will blabbermouth about sensitive company information, an example being employee wages. A bad bookkeeper will discuss the company's financial situation to outsiders who may have no business hearing about it. A bad bookkeeper isn't going to value the clause of strict discretion that's an integral part of their written employment contract, nor have careful measures to secure sensitive company info.

4. They Wont Strive to Continue their Education

A bad bookkeeper will feel that they know everything and will never ask if they can be better at their job. A bad bookkeeper does not think that higher-level finance knowledge will help them as long as they are "good enough" at their job. A bad bookkeeper doesn't make an effort to expand their knowledge in accounting, their firm, and their industry to help the decision makers run the business better

They Are Unethical

A bad bookkeeper will not disclose their mistakes to the management and will just hope it remains undetected sweeping it under the rug. A bad bookkeeper will fudge the books with false adjusting entries to make the accounts add up correctly instead of actually trying to go back and correct the inaccuracies themselves. A bad bookkeeper will steal from the business and attempt to cover their tracks. A bad bookkeeper doesn't believe that honestly and integrity are the fundamental characteristics which define their career path.

Conclusion

A good bookkeeper is well organized, is reliable, respects the confidentiality of the business's financial information, is always trying to further their education, and is always honest and ethical, part of which is acknowledging previous errors, going back to correct them, and asking for assistance when it's necessary.




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