How To Start A Bookkeeping Business

We often get asked about how to start a book keeping business. These days there are many small businesses that work from home, especially tradespeople that feel they cannot afford a bookkeeper, yet do not have the time to do the paperwork themselves, and hate bookkeeping, or are just not interested in book work.

You could get some flyers printed very cheaply to promote your bookkeeping business. Then pay some one to deliver them. Better still, go for a walk in your neighbourhood, and drop them into the letter boxes. You’ll be sure to pick up some clients that need their bookkwork doing, and you could offer them an introductory rate.

Will you help me build my bookkeeping business?

You can show your new bookkeeping clients how they’ll save money by engaging you, then they’ll tell their friends. By keeping it local, you’ll cut down travel time, and may even find that they’ll drop off the paperwork to you on their way past to their next job

How effective is newspaper advertising?

Advertising in the local paper is not very cost effective in our experience. You need to do it every week for a few months. It’s what other bookkeepers do, because it’s “easy”. They try it a few times, investing money that they didn’t really have in the first place, and seem surprised when the phone doesn’t ring. Then they contact us and ask us if we’ll help them build their bookkeeping business

If you want some help in designing your flyers, contact us, and we’ll give you some pointers about what does and doesn’t work. Initially you may spend three days a week chasing new bookkeeping clients, and a couple of days doing bookkeeping with your new clients.

After a few weeks, you’ll find you are doing four days working and one day chasing new business

Many bookkeepers start out while already working for a boss. There’s no reason why you couldn’t keep asking around and pick up some clients to work on after hours. That way you are not reliant on your job, and if anything should happen down the track, you won’t be left stranded.

That’s basically all we did to get started. Soon we found that we had more work, and were earning more than the regular “job”, so we made the decision to quit, and go our own ways. The question you’re asking is “How much do I charge?”

There’s no straight forward answer. Recently we phoned around town looking for a lawyer to help with a situation. Just to get started we were asked for $5000 up front to be put in a trust account, and were told the hourly rate was $350. Another lawyer quoted $275 with $1000 upfront, and the “cheapest” was $200 per hour. It’s a similar story with bookkeepers, in that there can be a wide variation of rates.

If you want more guidance with starting your own bookkkeeping busines then buy a franchise for between $30k - $50k. Or contact us and start to benefit from over thirty years of experience from the “school of hard knocks”

The first thing is to spell it correctly. Some people call it bookeeping, others bokkeeping, and others bookkeeeping.

Once you’ve overcome that hurdle, you’ve made a start, which is great.