When you’re comparing bookkeeper vs. accountant vs. controller, the difference comes down to scope. A bookkeeper records transactions and organizes financial reports. An accountant understands the tax rules and reporting options behind those numbers, and can close your books. A controller sits in between — managing day-to-day cash, accounts payable, and invoicing, often doing some bookkeeping and light tax work as a functional day-to-day partner.
“I delegated a task. The result was fine, but they didn’t do it how I would have done it. Should I say something?”
The first thing I’d ask is: how critical is this thing they did to the ongoing function of your business?
If this is the kind of task that’s like loading the dishwasher — where the outcome is everything gets clean, nothing is broken, and the next person can do it their own way — I wouldn’t say anything.
Do many of us have lots of opinions about the “right” way to load a dishwasher? Absolutely. But do we all have to load the dishwasher the same way to get to a good outcome? Definitely not.
Plus, the nice thing about the dishwasher problem is that we get to start over every time.
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Now, if this is an ongoing process or something that feeds into something else, and doing it their own way is going to break something downstream, then yes, you need to say something. The same is true if you have an SOP or a brand guide and they ignored it, or there were actual critical failures.
That conversation can be pretty simple: “We have a way that we do this. Did that process not work? Or did you not know about it?” Then you can get them back on track for next time.
But too often, we take tasks that are basically loading-the-dishwasher problems, where lots of different solutions are perfectly okay, and we micromanage them anyway.
If you’ve delegated something and the problem is solved, no harm was done, and nothing else is going to break because of how they got there, let it be solved. You learned something about the way that person thinks. If you need to manage them differently in the future, fine.
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What you don’t want to do is make them paranoid about solving problems.
That’s how you end up with everything right back on your list. If you repeatedly tell them they’re not doing it your way, you’re training them not to do anything without detailed instructions from you.
Think you delegated, but things keep coming back like a boomerang? Your own choices might be forcing everyone to keep you as the bottleneck. Embrace other’s dishwashing skills, find peace.
“How often should I be looking at my company’s financials, and what should I be looking for?”
If everything is going great, you have money in the bank, cash is flowing, and you don’t have a ton of transactions, once a month is fine.
But that’s the bare minimum.
On the other hand, if you’re having cash flow issues, you may need to look as often as every day. It really depends on the state of your business. If things are changing really fast or you’re tightly managing cash flow, do not feel bad that you are looking every day or communicating with your financial professionals every day.
But under placid waters, every four weeks is okay. (This is basically a monthly business review.)
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When you do that monthly check, start with your P&L. Make sure all of the revenue you think came in actually got recorded for the month. Look at your expenses. Are they what you expected them to be?
You’ll also want to look at your pipeline. Do you have enough leads, deals, or sales at the right stages that you feel confident in making your sales goals for the next 90 days?
When you know what’s happened, whether it matches your expectations, and how the future looks, you can build your confidence that things are working and you’re moving in the right direction.
“What’s the difference between a bookkeeper and an accountant?”
Truthfully, sometimes nothing. Sometimes a lot.
A bookkeeper can be an accountant, but they might also be someone who specializes in organizing financial reports. They’re trained in recording the credit and debit transactions in your accounts.
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Every transaction gets recorded in your financial reporting system as money coming in, money going out, an asset being purchased or sold, money you owe, or equity you’ve built — and then all of that gets put into the right places on your financial reports.
Accounting has to do with how we keep track of things in businesses and all of the rules that govern the tax system. It’s a financial language. It can help you understand the options available to you, including incentives you may be able to take advantage of, how money flows around the business, and how certain transactions should be recorded when there’s more than one way to handle them.
Someone who calls themselves an accountant should also be qualified to close your books, but they may not want to do your bookkeeping. On the other hand, you shouldn’t necessarily expect your bookkeeper to know much beyond, “This is where this goes on your financial reports.”
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But here is the thing I think people are often really asking when they ask me about the difference between a bookkeeper and an accountant.
There’s an in-between job called a controller.
A controller typically oversees more of the day-to-day cash management: accounts payable, invoicing, following up with people, and organizing your financial reports. They may also do bookkeeping. They may even do some tax-related work. But they are much more of a day-to-day functional business partner on that continuum between bookkeeping and accounting.
So if you keep running into this problem where you think, “A bookkeeper isn’t the right answer, but my accountant is also telling me they don’t do the things I need,” the right answer might be a controller.
The best part is, there are plenty of fractional controllers and agencies that offer different levels of support, once you know what you need.
