Do you think of a bookkeeper as an expense or an investment?

If you're like most business owners, you think of bookkeeping as something that helps you file your taxes - it's strictly a *compliance* focused exercise. It's something you have to do so you can do the thing that keeps the IRS from coming after you. Your bookkeeper becomes a necessary expense just like insurance and payroll.

And yeah, that's *one* thing that you need bookkeeping for.

If you *stop* there, though, you're going to prove yourself right. You'll start to hate your bookkeeper and the expense that they represent because they don't really *do* anything for you other than keeping you compliant with the government. There's no investment in this relationship - you've hired or contracted your bookkeeper (or paid for an app) as a bare minimum requirement for running your business.

That's what most business owners do, especially because most *bookkeepers* are compliance-focused. Most bookkeepers are *data entry clerks*. They record financial transactions according to tax forms or according to your tax pro, they generate reports that don't mean much to you (if they generate regular reports for you at all), and they aren't that interested in delivering more than a somewhat simpler tax filing experience.

There's a place for those people! Because ultimately, bookkeeping is about recording the financial activity of your business.

But that's not where it has to *stop*.

A great *operations* focused bookkeeper goes way beyond tax forms. Yes, they'll organize your activity in a way that will make filing taxes easier for a competent tax pro.

But they'll also help you *understand your business* better.

What does that mean? Based on *real numbers*, they'll be able to give you an idea of how well you can weather a period of low sales or high expenses. They'll be able to show you what's selling well or costing you the most money. They'll be able to organize your monthly reports in a way that helps you make better decisions about how to move forward, and then talk you through them so that they make sense to you. And there are thousands more examples of this.

They'll be able to help you understand how much your business can afford to *pay you*.

Operations focused bookkeepers are an *investment* in your business because they go beyond tax forms to give you information that will *help you reach your goals*.

Are you working with an Expense or an Investment? Which would you rather have on your team?