When I used to do accountancy jobs some time ago, many people who worked for me used to ask me how to find part-time work or indeed, full-time bookkeeping jobs in London.
I always used to recommend they start by taking a bookkeeping course at Pitman Training in London and Manchester. I always preferred their Notting Hill and High Holborn training centres as they were the nearest ones to where I lived and I also liked their very student focused ethos.
In any case, I found the way they thought of the bookkeeping course as a means to an end, ie as a route into bookkeeping jobs rather than as an educational experience per se, very refreshing.
The thing is that many people think bookkeeping jobs are unskilled which is completely erroneous as a bookkeeper will be tasked with the day to day handling of the financial transactions of an organisation.
Any manager or business owner would be mad to entrust someone who hadn’t done a recognised bookkeeping course with millions of pounds of money!
The real reason I like the Pitman Training bookkeeping courses and their Accounting Technician qualification in particular, is that they are so practical. Students get to do lots of practice, replicating what happens in real bookkeeping jobs, so they can more or less be relied upon to do the work correctly and with little supervision once they have qualified.
There are lots of more academic ways to train to be a bookkeeper but I feel at that operational level, the Pitman Training way is the right one.
Their Accounting Technician Diploma qualification is very comprehensive, too, covering basic bookkeeping, the various ledgers, double entry book-keeping and even a Sage Line 50 course which is essential if you’re serious about going for bookkeeping jobs.
I reckon most SME’s use Sage Line 50 but too many people think it’s sufficient just to learn how to enter transactions onto the system and I feel that’s short sighted.
Anyone can do data entry but Sage is a brilliant programme and unless you know what you’re doing, you’re likely to do more harm than good.
To my mind, any Sage Line 50 course should teach you everything from data entry to invoicing and credit notes, trial balance and final accounts, including profit and loss and balance sheet.
You certainly won’t find me doling out bookkeeping jobs to people who don’t know how to carry out those functions in Sage. So I suppose I’m saying that bookkeeping jobs are not an easy option. They underpin the accountancy function and as such are very important.
Another great thing about Pitman Training is that they provide payroll courses too and if you’re looking to get into book-keeping, that’s a really useful string to your bow.
They even teach Sage Payroll. But again, it’s the same story. If they’re not Pitman trained, do you really want unqualified people working out your wages?
I don’t!
If you want to find out more about how Pitman Training in London’s Notting Hill or High Holborn can help you skill up for bookkeeping jobs, why not give them a call?
Notting Hill – 020 7792 5214
Holborn – 020 7025 4700
Manchester - 0161 923 6814
Or contact them by email. Their Course Advisors are really helpful!
Just returning to that idea of letting an untrained person near your payroll, it's essential that the payroll clerk understands tax codes and how to apply them, not to mention Statutory Sick Pay and maternity allowance.
Can you imagine the queue of disgruntled employees waiting to speak to you if it was all wrong?
But then I guess it's the same if you're running Sales Ledger or Purchase Ledger.
Get an invoice wrong and you can upset a customer which is pretty bad and certainly on a par with mis-reporting to the Inland Revenue.
They'll be down on you like a ton of bricks with fines in addition to making up the shortfall in finance. I've seen it happen.
But if you're properly trained, it's less likely to happen to you.
I've always like the story of a bookkeeper's first 3 weeks working for a small company (click here to see it) which explains the stresses a bookkeeper is under.
More Bookkeeping Articles.
