We asked ‘what do we need to do to make the vat changes in our business?’. The answer came back that noone knew if the vendors of accounting software would be incorporating the new vat rate in to their products and we should operate a manual spreadsheet with a view to reentering all the transactions at a later stage.
Many people say they are a wet blanket or a waste of space? We asked a professional from a leading London accountancy form to explain the purpose of a bookkeeper and he told is that a book keepers mission is to prepare books to show to business managers.
The basic system of double entry bookkeeping was invented more than five hundred years ago by a Cistercian monk called Luca Pacioli. Every business, no matter how large or small, is required by law to ‘keep books’. This involves the recording of the financial transactions of a business, whether manually into ledgers or by entering everything onto a computer. Professional booker keeps are often certified. The Institute of Certified Bookkeepers is one such body.
Librarians are a different type of book keeper. Unlike accountants they keep books most people find interesting. The books that these book keepers keep can be accessed in places called libraries. There are projects such as Google Books which plan to make much of the kept books accessible via the internet. Whereas libraries tend to have limited opening times and restrict the geographical coverage they provide the Internet has none of these restrictions. User can search books online from anywhere in the world. Some libraries, like the British library, are trying to do a bit of both and make available some content online. Ook.