Bookkeeper | Role & Responsibilities

Bank Reconciliation
The recording of financial transactions within accounting software
Accounts Receivables: Preparing and sending invoices and receipts to debtors
Accounts Receivables: (Collections) Following up overdue accounts
Accounts payable. Reconcilcing monies owed and making payments where authorised to do so

Differences between a Bookkeeper & a CFO

Generally, with each step we ascend up the organisation chart, the more strategic the role becomes. Below are four (4) things that you would expect a CFO to do that you should not expect a Bookkeeper to do:

What level of engagement should you choose?

Training & Deployment Process

Your bookkeeper will be qualified, but they will still require extensive knowledge transfer with regard to your specific processes.

  1. Current processes for:
    1. Accounts receivables
    2. Account payables and invoicing
    3. Bank reconciliation
  2. Types of reports you would like to receive from them, such as end-of-month profit and loss, updated balance sheet, receivables etc
  3. Clarity around how often you would like them to work

We would not anticipate this initial training to take more than 10 hours and could be broken down into modules such as the above categories.

In most cases, the majority of the first month for a bookkeeper is spent cleaning up:

  • Bank reconciliation
  • Matching bank balances against accounting system balances
  • Ensuring aged receivables and payables are correct

Depending upon the volume of engagement, this may take the entire first month and will 100% correlate to how in order your financials are.

The extent to which you will need to be hands-on will be inversely related to the experience and seniority of the bookkeeper you select. If you are leasing a junior offshore bookkeeper you will need to be significantly more hands-on compared to a senior onshore bookkeeper. Your financial IQ should also come into play with your decision as to who to hire.

We suggest you invest 1 hour for every 10 hours engaged per month. For example, if your bookkeeper works for you 40 hours per month, a good amount of time to invest in managing your bookkeeper would be 4 hours.

Your role will be to:

  • Ensure the role is set up properly with a clear job description (choose from the above)
  • Liaising regarding invoice creation and following up of receivables
  • Chairing a weekly or fortnightly work-in-progress meeting via Zoom
  • Review the profit and loss, aged payables and receivables frequently to ensure the numbers look and feel right

Key Performance Indicators

Reporting Structure

Who should hire a Paid Media Coordinator?

Depending upon the size of the organisation, a Paid Media Coordinator should ideally report to, in ascending order:

  • The Chief Marketing officer (in medium to large organisations)
  • The Head of Marketing
  • The Head of Digital Marketing
  • The Marketing Manager
  • The Paid Media Manager

If you are a technician, solopreneur, or small business owner with no marketing experience, we strongly suggest that you hire a Paid Media Manager and not a Paid Media coordinator, or alternatively (and this would only stack up financially if the Social Media Coordinator was close to full-time, which would be likely if you had significant paid media activities taking place), hire a part-time Paid Media Manager to manage your Paid Media Coordinator.

Common Mistakes & Misconceptions

Below is a list of mistakes, misconceptions, and scenarios that hiring managers can find themselves in when hiring a Paid Media Coordinator:

When engaging a Paid Media Coordinator, the first 20 to 50 hours will likely need to be spent on the following:

  • Paid Media Audit – an analysis of historical performance
  • If there is no historical data, then your Paid Media Coordinator will need to develop some type of financial model to map out what can be expected from an ROAS, ROI, CPL and CPS perspective
  • Competitor analysis
  • Best practice benchmarketing – looking at industry statistics around TOI, ROAS, etc. to ascertain what the definition of a job well done actually looks like quantitatively

Further to the above, ads need time to play out, and this will depend upon the type of ads and where they are in the marketing funnel. Top-of-funnel cold traffic leads will take time to convert, as your marketing funnel pushes the prospects further down towards purchase.

An example of this would be a Facebook campaign in which the ascension path is the downloading of an eBook. A prospect such as that may not convert for 1 to 6 months. Alternatively, if you are engaging in search-based Google Ads campaigns and you have intelligently used buyer-intent keywords, your prospects will be more bottom-of-funnel and may purchase much sooner.

A trained and effective Paid Media Coordinator will ideally want to do at least three (3) things before a campaign is launched:

  1. Paid Media Audit. What is the current state of play? What channels are being used? What is the current ROI & ROAS?
  2. Assessment of Competitors’ Social Channels: Knowing what is best practice and what the market leaders and nearby competitors are up to is critical in staying relevant and ahead of the curve.
  3. Paid Media Plan Development. In life and in business, things tend to play out more optimally if a plan has been developed.