5 Questions To Ask While Hiring Bookkeeper Employees

By Author: Ritu Mishra
Total Articles: 2
Comment this article

In the current digital revolution, every business is looking to go online and churn the most out of it. It must be noted that creating a worthy online business is not as easy as it is said. A lot of things are associated with pre-development and post-development phase. Once, your business is live and starts functioning, you may need different skilled people to take care of minor things to focus on the major aspects of the business. Bookkeeping is one such field and is often confused with the accounting. But do remember in broader sense Bookkeeping services can be called as a part of accounting but not the whole accounting thing.

A Bookkeeper needs to take care of menial things like - bank reconciliation, invoicing, and generations of reports, which may seem small but yet are very significant for the overall business reputation. Taking into consideration the responsibilities and efforts required in this work, making a wise choice for outsourcing or hiring a good full-time Bookkeeper is of utmost importance. A proper interview with filed related queries is the best way to judge and find the best candidate for the role ...
... of Bookkeeping. To assist the readers, below are some questions that must be asked while hiring or outsourcing Bookkeeper employees to assess whether that is the right fit for your company or not.

1. What is the extent of the bookkeeping work?

It may sound like a simple question but has high importance because of the huge scope of services offered by the bookkeepers. Also, the requirements vary from business to business and depend upon the nature of work. Some require bookkeepers to accomplish accounts related work to assist CA, while others may require only services for data entry.

The scope and extent of work require the following queries:

a) How often is it required to accommodate bank transactions on a daily/weekly/monthly basis?

b) How are supplier bills and paying suppliers reconciled?

c) How are the sales invoices and following up account holders done?

d) How are sales tax, GST, and VAT filed?

2. Are they qualified and registered?

You must inquire about the educational qualification like - diploma or accounting degree possessed by the bookkeeper's services providers. It is because sometimes they even require to handle sales tax and other tax-related work. Also, the personal or outsourced company for this job must be recognized by the government to validate the work done by them. In some countries, bookkeepers services providers need to be registered with respective Government organizational and Tax Practitioners Board.

3. What is their level of expertise and how familiar are they with the Bookkeeping industry?

Experience and high-level expertise are mandatory to establish on-time and accurate accounts related to communication with various parties. These qualities help in the removal of any conflict of interest in the future by cleaning any mess related to accountant work. A good bookkeeper always identifies any error and accurately review and remove any discrepancy in the whole process.

To be a hundred percent assured about that expertise and knowledge, do ask the service provider to give details about the previous work, and information about the organizations worked in the past.

4. How will they protect their client's financial information?

A Bookkeeper has access to the critical financial information about your organization, hence you require someone who you can trust with classified information. To clear the doubts, ask about the procedures they are going to imply for internal controls and segregation of duties.

5. How are they going to manage delivery and response times?

Clients often face a situation where the response time is not that adequate and misses a crucial deadline. To avoid such situations, it's better to ask about the creation of a delivery and response timeline in the initial phase itself for the smooth completion of bookkeeping related work. It must be noted that this timeline should be made with the mutual consent and should be agreed upon by both the parties. It is also a better way to generate trust by the Bookkeeping services providers in the eyes of clients.Also, a daily/weekly/monthly/ response time along with the amount of work accomplished in that time frame, streamlines and ensures smooth functioning of the whole Bookkeeping operations.

To wrap up, above are some of the most important questions that must be asked before hiring any Bookkeeping service providers. Also, if you are looking for a top-notch Bookkeeping service provider, you can contact MyVirtualTask, a staffing services company in mumbai, with your project details. We have a decade of experience in this field and have helped our clients in accomplishing their bookkeeping endeavors in an entirely viable way.