Ten Questions to Ask Before Hiring a Freelance Bookkeeper

If you are running a business which is a large scale, it is quite obvious that you would certainly invest some amount of money and park budget in order to have a full-fledged finance and accounting team. 

There is no organization that can operate without having a proper accountant or financial advisors. The role of these people in any organization becomes extremely significant because they handle everything related to the transactions. They would give you an insight into the health of the business and the direction that your business is going towards.  

These are the people that are responsible for enabling the organization towards success. The accounting team and bookkeeping team help stakeholders with periodical reports and analysis that would help them to rectify the errors and start looking forward to achieving success and make more profit. 

If you are unable to set up a complete team of accountants and bookkeepers, you can always choose to hire the freelance bookkeeping services because the industry is extremely vast, and you’ll be able to find the resources almost immediately.  

However, when you’re planning to hire a freelance bookkeeper, a lot of risks involved, and those things can be reduced when you develop the art of questioning right. In this article, we have down some of the important questions that you need to ask when you are hiring a bookkeeper for your business.

1. The skill sets

 

 

If you’re planning to pick up a freelance bookkeeper from the pool of resources, it is mandatory that you question the candidate on the skill sets that they have acquired. 

 

2. Asking for the relevant experience

 

This is yet another important question that you must definitely pose in front of a freelance bookkeeper in order to get hold of the right person. Unless and until you ask them about the relevant experience details, it almost becomes impossible for you to align them to your business.

3. Prior experience

 

 

Make sure to speak about the prior experience in the freelance industry and also as a bookkeeper. It is important that they have prior experience in both these industries in order to handle the tasks without any supervision.

 

4. Reasons for becoming a freelance bookkeeper

 

 

If you find the profile to be interesting, it is important that you check for the reasons as to why they chose the freelance industry over full time. When you ask these questions to the bookkeeper, you would be immediately able to understand the motive and also their commitments regarding the assignment. 

5. Speak to them about the deadlines

 

 

When you hire freelance bookkeepers, they might not be as committed as a full-time employee; therefore, you need to start asking them questions regarding the way they operate in order to complete an assignment within the deadline. This can also be a great hint of whether or not to hire these resources for your business. 

6. The kind of clients that have worked in the past

 

 

Although bookkeeping is a generic role, the kind of clients that they would have met maybe into certain specific domains, it becomes important for you to understand the clients that they have worked in the past as you might also belong to the same fraternity and it gives you an opportunity to check on the credibility of the freelance bookkeeper that you are planning to hire for your business.

7. Question them on generic skills

 

 

As a bookkeeper, it is important that they understand a little bit about the accounting and finance domain, although they are not expected to understand everything in detail and technically. Therefore, as a client, it becomes your responsibility to check the generic skill sets and only then proceed to hire them.

 

8. Question them on the overall finance industry

 

 

If a resource is not aware of the whereabouts and also the recent happenings in and around the finance industry or the domain as a whole, you must never proceed to get that person onboarded. It is always better to hire a bookkeeper who is willing to understand much more about the finance industry and apply those techniques when you start giving the assignments.

9. Questions on various applications that are used

 

 

There are a lot of applications and tools that have been specifically designed for accountants and bookkeepers in order to make the task simple. It is important for the bookkeeper to understand and have knowledge of these applications. Check their levels of knowledge on these things.

10. Questions related to ethics

 

 

A lot of freelancers take up the jobs too casually, and that might not be the right attitude. Remember to ask them basic ethical questions, and that can help you to get the right bookkeepers.

These are the top 10 questions that every client must get the freelance bookkeeper to answer even before they hand over the assignments to them.