Modern Bookkeeping
Bookkeeping is the science and art of assembling and recording financial transactions. It’s a very old practice. Some of the earliest examples of writing recorded inventories, debts, and trades. Those records are on clay, but in more recent times bookkeepers recorded every single business transaction in “daybooks.” These voluminous records were then compiled and summarized by an accountant to produce financial reports.
For a long time bookkeeping was a basic clerical position requiring a tremendous amount of manual work sorting, compiling, writing and filing. Times have changed. Technology like bank feeds, APIs, digital files, algorithms and optical character recognition has reduced or eliminated most of the work traditionally done by bookkeepers. At the same time businesses have grown more complex and the need for accurate and informative financial reports has never been more important.
The Eagle and Pelican Way
Bookkeepers have an intimate view into the inner workings of an organization. Too often this is squandered. In many organizations, especially ones that can’t afford a full time finance team, this perspective and the insights it brings are not incorporated into wider financial analysis and organizational management. When bookkeepers were consumed with mundane, manual data entry, it didn’t add up to have a much more expensive CFO or accountant heavily involved in the work of bookkeeping.
We believe that has changed.
Today, good bookkeepers should have more in common with project managers, process engineers, or financial accountants than data entry clerks. Taking advantage of labor saving technology and techniques means it is now cost efficient for us to leverage our knowledge and experience from being your bookkeeper into better reporting and more insightful analysis.
Want to learn more? Check out our Plans & Pricing, or schedule a New Client Exploratory Meetings to help you decide if we’re a good fit for your organization’s needs.