Bookkeeping and Accounting Clerks

A Day in the Life

When you decided to become a bookkeeping clerk, you were amazed at the sheer variety of positions available to you. After all, virtually every business, nonprofit organization or government agency that employs more than a handful of people requires a dedicated bookkeeping professional.

You chose to take a job with a law firm that employs about 25 people. Although your job is salaried and considered to be a full-time position, you work variable hours. Your workload depends upon the amount of auditing and accounting that needs to be done during a given week.

This week, you have an average workload. As such, you arrive at the office just as several other members of the firm's support staff are walking in the door.

You sit down at your desk and take about 15 minutes to sort through your e-mails. While most of the communication between you and your colleagues takes place in person due to your firm's relatively low employee count, you'll occasionally receive a high-priority e-mail from a partner who's spending time out of town.

Since you don't see any such correspondence, you close your inbox and open your business's professional accounting program. Although you can dimly remember a time before the widespread adoption of high-powered bookkeeping programs like QuickBooks, you haven't used an analog ledger in years. The digital age has radically transformed your day-to-day activities as a bookkeeping clerk.

You spend most of the morning inputting new client invoices into your office's "accounts receivable" file. Next, you check your firm's escrow accounts to determine how many clients have forwarded payment since the day before. You update the accounts receivable file to reflect these receipts.

While you're doing this, you notice that several clients have become delinquent on their accounts. You print out the appropriate number of copies of the form letter that you use to inform clients of such delinquencies and run down to the office's mail room to ensure that the letters leave with the afternoon's outgoing mail.

In the mail room, you check your inbox and discover several payment envelopes in it. After opening them, you update your accounts receivable file to credit the appropriate clients' accounts. To ensure that you don't forget to deposit these checks, you leave the office on your lunch break and run to the local bank. These daily bank runs are your favorite part of the workday.

While you're there, you withdraw $200 from the firm's account to fund a going-away party for a paralegal who was recently accepted to law school. You'll give the money to the firm's office manager and make a note of the withdrawal upon returning to the office.

You spend most of the afternoon working on a quarterly profit-loss statement. Although the firm has performed well so far this year, you're worried about a slight drop in hours billed over the previous month. You make a note to discuss this with the partner to whom you report.

Since you're not especially busy, you duck out of the office at 4:30 p.m. and pick up one of your kids from soccer practice. Although you know that you'll be busier towards the end of the quarter, you're grateful for the occasional flexibility that your job provides.