External bookkeeper required and some general questions

Marketplace
1

Afternoon all

The person who has done our bookkeeping for the last couple of years is moving on. She was not a formal bookkeeper and basically carried on from what I had started during the first few years of the company. I feel that it is time to outsource this to a professional but I’m not really sure where to start arranging this.

We are a small/micro company with four full-time employees and a couple of contractors. Turnover is around the 500k mark. We probably create one or two purchase invoices a day and perhaps up to 10 sales invoices a week. Sometimes the purchase invoices can spike up to 5-10 per day if we are working on a large project or one that requires us to order a lot of components from different suppliers.

The current bookkeeper also does some day to day admin for the company and so finding someone that could also take on some general data entry (filing employee expenses, recording time spent onsite with clients, etc) would also be beneficial but this is by no means essential. I’d rather have the reassurance that we are having our bookkeeping done to a professional standard and that everything is being recorded via the correct accounting codes, etc.

A few general queries if I may:

How does it work with actually doing a payment run to suppliers? The current bookkeeper is well known and trusted and so has access to the company bank account. What is the workflow with an external bookkeeper? Obviously we do not want to grant access to the bank to an unknown third party and so how do other small businesses handle this issue? We use Natwest business banking and I’m not aware of any feature within it that would allow someone to queue up payments to then be authorised.

I’d also be keen to hear any comments about processes that bookkeepers use and how we can ensure that things operate smoothly. i.e at the moment if I purchase something for the company to later resell to a client, I simply buy the item (usually online) and then forward the receipt or at least the purchase confirmation (if the VAT is not issued at the time of purchase) to the bookkeeper and she enters it on the system. Then, if/when the VAT receipt arrives I forward this and it’s updated within quickfile, ready for the VAT return (which our accountant does, and for now we will keep it that way). If we are making a large purchase with a supplier with which we have a credit account then we generally issue a purchase order which is emailed to them. They usually then send us an order confirmation and then when the goods ship they send the invoice. At the point of receiving the invoice the bookkeeper converts the PO in QF to a purchase invoice and attaches the received invoice to the record.
I have no idea if this is the standard way of doing things, it’s just the system I came up with when I was juggling everything in the company and wearing multiple hats for the first couple of years.

Appreciate the advice!

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Does your current bookkeeper work on site or does she access QF remotely? How many hours per week does she currently do?

External bookkeepers do not usually set up payments with the bank. They would enter the supplier invoices and can set up a weekly payment run (i.e. list of who and what to pay) for you, but then someone with access to the account would need to process the actual payments.

Uploading documentation to the accounting software for later processing is a fairly standard way of working, it all sounds quite organised to me.

You may be best to Google local firms of accountants who will often have a number of bookkeepers working for them. Better still, ask your accountant if they have someone or can recommend anyone.

If you look for someone self-employed, make sure you check their references. Anyone can call themselves an accountant or a bookkeeper, but they are not all created equal :wink: A good bookkeeper is absolutely worth their weight in gold :moneybag: