Who Trains the Next Bookkeeper?

I learned this job by doing work that hardly exists anymore. Keying in transactions, coding line by line, reconciling manually, chasing paperwork that turned up in a shoebox months after the fact, and sorting out messes. I don't miss any of it, and I'm not about to argue it should have stayed. But I do actually think it was necessary, as it gave me the foundation I needed to be a good bookkeeper. That manual work, trying to work out why things were out of balance, learning attention to detail and the repetition of it all, is where I learned to pick up when something wasn't right.

That work is going, in fact a lot of it has already gone. I do see this as a win, but at the same time I have some real concerns about this. The work that is now automated is exactly the work we used to hand to our newest hire, and the result is that employers in the profession just don't have a need for the admin staff and junior bookkeeper anymore. This means no one is working their way up, gaining the valuable experience that allows them to have the judgement and insights that a great bookkeeper needs.

So where is our next generation of bookkeepers going to come from?

If you are a bookkeeping practice owner with a team, when did you last take on someone brand new to the profession, rather than someone another practice had already trained? 

If you hired someone with no experience next month, what would you actually put in front of them to learn on, when the software is already doing the coding and a big chunk of the thinking?

The reality is, judgement used to be a by-product. None of us set out to specifically learn it, it just accumulated... you processed enough transactions across enough businesses that you started to recognise the patterns, and one day you looked at a set of numbers and knew something was off before you even knew what the issue was. And... what once could have taken you hours to find now takes minutes. That is where the real value comes from, bookkeepers who instinctively know when something isn't right, where the problems are, how to identify them, fix them and keep business owners on track in real time, not just when their accountant reviews the numbers maybe months after the problems have done the damage.

So why am I worried? Because the work this profession is moving towards is all about judgement. Clients will pay us for the call we make in the grey area, for the risk we carry when we sign off on something, for noticing that a set of numbers that looks perfectly reasonable... actually isn't. If we end up with people who can run the software beautifully but can't tell when it's wrong, we haven't just lost the entry level work, we've lost the value of our profession.

So here's what I think we need to be doing about it in our own practices, and most of it applies whether you've got a team of ten, or a team of one.

1.       Teach review instead of processing. A new starter used to earn the right to review by processing for a couple of years first, but that order doesn't work anymore, so put them into exception review early with a checklist that tells them what to look for, then educate them on why it's wrong and how to fix it.

2.       Give them the messy jobs. The reconstruction, the twelve months behind, the client whose data has been wrong for two years, the payroll that's been underpaid against the award. So the person has to reason their way through it, and that is where the learning actually happens. With you supervising and reviewing as well of course.

3.       Bring them into client conversations far earlier than we used to. We kept juniors well away from clients until they were technically solid and then wondered why they froze the first time a business owner asked them a direct question. Get them into the meetings to listen, then ease them into conversations, email communications and discussing the numbers with the clients, because being able to explain the numbers is a core skill.

4.       Teach the rules underneath the tech and the software. Someone has to know what the award actually says, how the super obligations work, what the GST treatment should be, and why the system has produced the answer it has. When the tech is right most of the time, there is a huge amount of importance in the bookkeeper being able to identify when the tech gets it wrong.

5.       If you're on your own, the next bookkeeper you're training is you. This isn't only an employer problem, it applies to every one of us who learned this craft in a completely different environment, so pick the area you're weakest in, whether that's AI, systems, payroll depth or the advisory conversation, and block out your learning in your calendar as planned and protected time... then skill up!

What this is doing to our profession

We already have a workforce problem. There aren't enough bookkeepers to service the businesses that need us, a large part of the profession is closer to the end of their career than the start, and the pipeline coming in behind us is thin. Now the entry level work that used to be how someone got their foot in the door is being taken over by tech. If practices can't afford to carry someone while they learn, and are looking for bookkeepers who are already tech savvy, and there's no obvious first job for a new person to do, we end up with fewer bookkeepers.

There's a flip side to it too. The job we're describing now, reviewing rather than processing, interpreting the rules, designing the systems, supporting them with technology and change, sitting in front of business owners and explaining what the numbers mean, how to streamline and how to adopt technology, is a far more attractive career than it was when I started out. But.... how are our newbies to the profession going to get their training so they can replace us when we retire?

What formal training needs to look like now

Which brings me to the qualifications, and this is where I think the conversation has to get serious.

The Cert IV was built around teaching someone to do the work. Set up the file, process the transactions, understand debits and credits, reconcile the accounts, review and prepare the BAS, and you're assessed on whether you can carry out the steps. But the steps are the part that's automating, and a qualification that certifies that someone can perform a task the software already performs isn't preparing them for the job they're walking into.

What a new bookkeeper needs to learn now is different. They need to be able to review rather than produce, which means recognising an error in an automated result and knowing what caused it. They need real depth in payroll and employment obligations, awards, super, and the areas where getting it wrong, can cost a client dearly because that's where the risk sits and risk is what we as Bookkeepers are paid to carry. They need to understand systems and how the applications talk to each other. Implementing and maintaining the tech stack has now become part of the job... that is an entirely new skill set, and it is expected of bookkeepers. They need to know how to use tech and AI properly and, more to the point, how to verify what it gives them. And they need security, communication and ethics treated as core competencies rather than something you pick up along the way.

Then there's the experience requirement. The "hours of relevant experience" were designed on the assumption that time spent doing the work equals competence developed, which held up when the work was manual and repetitive and you learned by volume. It doesn't hold up as well now. Somebody can log the hours while the software does the thinking and come out the other side certified... but not necessarily capable. And there's the other side of it, because with so much of the work automated it's far harder for someone to accumulate the hours in the first place, so the pathway to becoming a Registered BAS Agent is getting longer and slower at exactly the time we need more of them. 

None of that is a criticism of the people delivering the training, but training organisations take years to update their units, and unfortunately technology is not waiting for them.

There's a real upside in all of this... 

The entry point into this profession is going to be higher than it was, and the work and the career opportunities are far better and way more interesting than what I started out on.

So, the question I'd leave you with is this... if someone new to bookkeeping walked into your practice next month, keen, capable, and with no experience at all, what would you hand them to learn on, and who in your business would teach them?

Keep Thriving

Martine