The Role of a Bookkeeper in an Accounting Department (#338)
/Where do the job duties of a bookkeeper end and the duties of a financial accountant begin? It’s unclear what duties would change if a bookkeeper becomes a staff accountant.
Position of the Bookkeeper in an Accounting Department
First, and just to be clear, a bookkeeper is not part of the normal hierarchy of an accounting department. Either you have a bookkeeper who mostly works alone or with the assistance of an outside CPA, or you have a controller running things, along with maybe an assistant controller and some accounting clerks. So, if you have a bookkeeper title being used within a larger accounting department, then you probably need to give a new title to the person being called the bookkeeper.
That being said, where does the person formerly known as the bookkeeper end up within a larger accounting department? Well, consider how an accounting department usually evolves. It begins with just the bookkeeper, who handles almost everything, and only handing off to an outside CPA for the more difficult activities. Once the company gets a bit larger, management brings in someone with more expertise to be the controller, which means that the bookkeeper is pushed down in the organizational structure. A good initial spot for the former bookkeeper is the assistant controller position, because at this point the bookkeeper has a broad knowledge of everything, and so can offer advice to the controller.
Whether the former bookkeeper can stay in that position as the company continues to expand depends entirely on whether he or she can adapt to the increasing complexity of the business. If not, it’s entirely possible that the former bookkeeper keeps getting pushed down within the structure of the department, and probably ends up specializing in one of the major sub-areas, like payroll, or customer billings, or accounts payable.
It's much less likely that this person ends up in one of the specialized positions, like general ledger clerk, or cost accountant, or public company reporting specialist. Those positions are more likely to have a bachelor’s degree in accounting and may also have a CPA certification, which is usually not the case for a bookkeeper.
Risk of Bookkeeper Departure
And unfortunately, there’s a pretty high risk that the former bookkeeper will leave the company, and possibly fairly soon after the controller is hired. The reason is obvious. Would you want to stick around if you’ve gone from running your own department to having reduced responsibilities?
Having the bookkeeper leave is usually not a good thing, at least for the next few years. The trouble is that the bookkeeper is the central repository of information about accounting transactions, and will remain that way for a while. So, it makes sense to coddle the former bookkeeper for multiple months and maybe a year, until it’s clear that enough knowledge has been transferred to other people within the department.
Summary
So, to go back to the original question, it’s hard to say exactly how the duties of a bookkeeper will change once the person becomes a staff accountant. A fairly weak bookkeeper will be pushed down within the department’s organizational structure pretty quickly, whereas someone with a significant amount of skill could very well become the assistant controller, and stay there. It all depends on the person’s experience, knowledge level, and willingness to adapt to the increasing complexity of the business.