Bookkeeping

[reepicheep]

My cult hired me to be their bookkeeper in December.

Their books were a shit show. I had no formal experience bookkeeping, other than the off-and-on tracking of my own money I do sometimes. But they needed somebody who could handle sitting at a computer and wasn't afraid of email, the internet, or spreadsheets, and I met all of that criteria. The bar was low. We have a professional bookkeeping firm in town that handles our quickbooks stuff -- all the real accounting. I basically translate our cult weirdness into real-people speak. We also have a professional who does our taxes -- I hired her, in fact, to do my personal taxes.

Since then, I'm finding that I rather like it. I've developed some initial skill at coding basic formulas into our spreadsheets after I got tired of doing basic math on a calculator, and developed some more complicated stuff with the help of a buddy with more skill than me who is still active duty cyber in the AF. I've hit a lot of the low-hanging fruit; we no longer pay any of our bills by sending in hand-written checks (egads!). We pay all of them online via autopay. Most of the staff is now on direct deposit. I've moved more of our filing into the digital realm, because I'm lazy. In fact, I've made my job so easy that I'm now looking for more work to do.

I've convinced my cult to reimburse me for the cost of an online quickbooks course, which I'll take sometime in the next six weeks or so. I think I could take on more of the transaction categorization and invoice generation work that our firm in town does, thus allowing me to negotiate for a raise, which I've gotten a lot of support for.

Short of going back to school for accounting, which would be overkill at this point, what other resources might I consider looking at as I try to upgrade my skills? I could see myself finding a better paying part time job in real bookkeeping in a couple of years, or maybe going to work for our firm in town (they offered me a job before the pandemic started...kinda on hold right now).

[saving-10-years]

Part-time book-keeper always seemed to me like a great part-time gig, because it has definite boundaries and people who employ bookkeepers seem to respect them and the boundaries.

There is an UK Open University course on bookeeping/accountancy as part of their free open content.
Course outcomes are:

After studying this course, you should be able to:

understand and apply the essential numerical skills required for bookkeeping and accounting
understand and explain the relationship between the accounting equation and double-entry bookkeeping
record transactions in the appropriate ledger accounts using the double-entry bookkeeping system
balance off ledger accounts at the end of an accounting period
prepare a trial balance, balance sheet and a profit and loss account.

https://www.open.edu/openlearn/money-bu ... iption-tab