What's the difference between an accountant and a bookkeeper?

Whether you sell cars, legal services, homemade crafts, or smartphones and computers… there are two things are can guarantee about your business: money comes in and money goes out. Financial experts like Accountants and bookkeepers are the ones who help you manage all of that.

Both can help you manage your finances, prepares tax returns, and may very well help you run the day-to-day aspects of your business. An interesting little bit of history is that accountants and bookkeepers have been around since 2600BC, when records were tracked with a stylus on slabs of clay, making accountancy one of the world's oldest professions.

In colonial America, bookkeepers would record transactions in a “waste book” (so-called because the data would eventually make its way into an official ledger and the original book would be thrown out). Today those initial entries are likely made by a bookkeeper, and then handed off to an accountant come tax time.

So what’s the difference between accountants and bookkeepers?

Well, there are some financial tasks that bookkeepers simply aren’t trained for, and that’s where acco