Most tradies don’t decide to do their own bookkeeping. It just ends up on their plate. Here’s how to tell when it’s costing you more than it saves.
The deadline arrives before the paperwork does, and the return gets thrown together the night before.
What it costs: missed claims, late-filing penalties, and a number you’re never quite sure of.
Evenings and Sundays go to reconciling instead of quoting, family, or the couch.
What it costs: your hours, at your charge-out rate. The most expensive bookkeeper you could possibly hire is you.
A miscoded expense here, GST claimed where it shouldn’t be, a supplier bill paid twice. Each one is small on its own.
What it costs: a year-end accountant bill for untangling twelve months of them at once.
The only real picture of the business arrives with the annual accounts, months after the decisions were already made.
What it costs: pricing and hiring calls made on gut feel instead of facts.
Jobs finished but not invoiced. Invoices sent but not followed up.
What it costs: you front the materials and wages while your money sits in someone else’s account.
Add up the hours you spent on the books last month and multiply by your charge-out rate. Compare that to a bookkeeper’s monthly fee. That’s the whole decision, in one line.
A good bookkeeper reconciles weekly, files GST on time, catches the small errors while they’re still small, and hands you a plain-English report each month so you know exactly how the business is doing.
You get your evenings back, and a set of books your accountant doesn’t have to fix.
The mistake that turns up most often when we take over a set of books: The GST claim tradies most often get wrong →
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