Can you offer
Book keeping Services?

Are you able to offer book keeping services? Perhaps not at accountancy level, but just straightforward accounting for small business? If so, you are so much in demand, you should be walking on air!

This one of the great income earning skills and is something where there is a huge gulf between those who can, and those who won't. Let me explain.......

Quite simply, most "practical" people hate paperwork.

They understand the need for it of course, but they will put it off and then put it off some more.

Accounts will, "at best" be a cardboard box with some, or all, of the year's receipts tossed in it. Often, invoices aren't sent out promptly, ones that have been are not chased up - resulting in poor cash flow - and the end of every financial year is dreaded because of the compulsory legal tax returns. I know this to be true, because I am like it myself and certainly for the last few years, my tax returns have been made at the last possible moment!

It is a fact that small building start-up companies - often one-man - are most likely to fail and be made bankrupt. Not because they lack the income earning skills to do their chosen job, but because they are unable to control cash-flow.

Conversely, those people to whom paperwork seems to come naturally, envy what they see as the freedom of people who work with their hands and envy their practical skills. It really isn't a joke that some people 'can't put up a shelf without damaging the wall'. Each to our own and let's recognise that here we have a marriage made in heaven.............

Ask around and see who is starting out as a self employed tradesman. Explain that you offer book keeping services and ask if they might like someone to 'keep their books' for them.

Put the usual postcards in shop windows and put an advert in your church or parish magazine. Just keep it simple and honest.

If you offer book keeping services, don't claim to be an accountant. Often, that would be counter productive anyway, because someone who lacks the confidence to put him/herself into the hands of - what they perceive to be an 'expensive' accountant - will be more inclined to work with you.

And a marriage made in heaven?

One man's income earning skills are another man's nightmare. You move in different circles, have different friends and will hear about people wanting small jobs doing - gardening, plumbing, a small wall building perhaps. Maybe, even that shelf that needs fixing!

You are going to know some good tradesman aren't you?

Equally of course, those same tradesmen talk amongst themselves, and it won't be long before you are being asked if you will 'just take a look' at someone else's books. In this life we all need one another.