I have been asked to do some book keeping for a small company in my town. I have never done any book-keeping before and all I know so far is that it will involve a program called Quickbooks. I will be trained although my "trainer" has limited experience of book-keeping.
For various reasons I'd like to do some courses in book-keeping and I am wondering where would be a good place to start?
My local college offers NVQ levels1-3 in book-keeping. In my experience level 1 NVQ is not too difficult ( I have studied at post-grad level) and I am wondering if it would be easier to do some home-based, on-line courses and then sign up for a level 2 or 3 at college?
In anycase, what's the "gold-standard" book-keeping qualification that an employer looks for?
sounds as though you've been dropped right in the doo doo from the deep end!
book keeping isn't anywhere near as straight forwards as your employers seem to think. If it was it wouldn't take us all years you pass the exams of our respective supervisory bodies.
I'm hioping that what your employer is actually asking for is just sales ledger data entry work which is only a fraction of the work of a bookkeeper.
Best estimate that I could give for you to go from no knowledge to a basic knowledge of bookkeeping would be around 12 weeks.
Good introductory courses in the £200 - £300 price bracket that would get your uderstanding online quickly would be the OU course B190 (basic Bookkeeping) or the AAT ABC bookkeeping course. You could then use these courses to gain exemptions from some papers of a professional body as you advance your studies whilst gaining experience on the job.
I'm suspecting from your introduction that what your employer is actually looking for is for you to spend an afternoon watching over someone's shoulder as they use the basics of quickbooks and then let you loose assuming that you are then a bookkeeper!
Good books to get your bookkeeping knowledge kick started would be :
mastering accounting skills by Margaret Nicholson
Mastering Book-Keeping skills by Peter Marshall
Business Accounts for bookkeeping and accountancy courses by David Cox
You can pick the three up from Amazon for under £40.
Really wish you the best matey.
Good luck,
Shaun.
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Shaun
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
The gold standard bookkeeping qualification for employers is AAT. Just do a search on the Reed website and look what they're looking for in assistant accountants (pretty much the work of a bookkeeper). It's either AAT or PQ (PQ refers to part qualified accounts) or CAT (the ACCA equivalent of AAT).
The various levels and equivalents would be :
ICB or IAB - if you want to go down the self employed bookkeeper route. ICB definitely seems to be gaining favour on this site but the two are both aimed at the same market place.
AAT or CAT - if you want to be an employed bookkeeper with the option of going freelance. AAT seems to be the most sought after by emplotyers.
ACCA or CIMA - if you want to become an accountant (although MAAT's also call themselves accountants). Note that becoming an accountant also involves jumping through lots of burning hoops and you would be strongly advised to think long and hard before considering study at this level.
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Shaun
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
Just to confirm, they are intending to employ you full/ part time, on their payroll. (Eg you have all the benefits of employment, sick pay, holiday pay etc)
The reason I ask is that if they are not actually employing you but just want you to come in every so often, and pay you directly there are (to quote Shaun) other "burning hoops to jump through" regarding money laundering regulations.
As you do not have that much experience with bookkeeping, I thought I would make sure you were aware, before you fall foul of the law.
If they are giving you proper employment, you do not need to be so concerned about the ML regulations.
If you have no experience of bookkeeping and you are being "trained" on Quickbooks by someone who has little experience of bookkeeping you could get yourself into a mess very, very, quickly.
You really need an understanding of manual bookkeeping before embarking on using any accounting software, otherwise you will not be able to spot and rectify any errors.
Hope you don't mind my added my "two pennies worth"!!!!
I have a client that a few years ago, decided she wanted to learn computerised bookkeeping so she could do her own bookkeeping. She signed up to the local college and lasted only 2 lessons. She discovered the course only taught how to use Sage. The accounting package her business used was not Sage. For a professional bookkeeper this is not a problem, if they have a sound knowledge of manual bookkeeping, they can transfer the knowledge to any package - but it does not work very well the other way, it is difficult to use other computerised packages, if you learn on one and have no other bookkeeping knowledge.