Bookkeeper

Bookkeeping is the recording of financial transactions, and is part of the process of accounting in business. It is the only word in the English language with three consecutive groups of a repeating letter. Transactions include purchases, sales, receipts, and payments by an individual person or an organization/corporation. There are several standard methods of bookkeeping, such as the single-entry bookkeeping system and the double-entry bookkeeping system, but, while they may be thought of as "real" bookkeeping, any process that involves the recording of financial transactions is a bookkeeping process.

Bookkeeping is usually performed by a bookkeeper. A bookkeeper (or book-keeper) is a person who records the day-to-day financial transactions of a business. He or she is usually responsible for writing the daybooks, which contain records of purchases, sales, receipts, and payments. The bookkeeper is responsible for ensuring that all transactions whether it is cash transaction or credit transaction are recorded in the correct daybook, supplier's ledger, customer ledger, and general ledger; an accountant can then create reports from the information concerning the financial transactions recorded by the bookkeeper.

The bookkeeper brings the books to the trial balance stage: an accountant may prepare the income statement and balance sheet using the trial balance and ledgers prepared by the bookkeeper.

The origin of book-keeping is lost in obscurity, but recent researches would appear to show that some method of keeping accounts has existed from the remotest times. Babylonian records have been found dating back as far as 2600 B.C., written with a stylus on small slabs of clay. The term "waste book" was used in colonial America referring to bookkeeping. The purpose was to document daily transactions including receipts and expenditures. This was recorded in chronological order, and the purpose was for temporary use only. The daily transactions would then be recorded in a daybook or account ledger in order to balance the accounts. The name "waste book" comes from the fact that once the waste book's data were transferred to the actual journal, the waste book could be discarded.

The bookkeeping process primarily records the financial effects of transactions. The difference between a manual and any electronic accounting system results from the former's latency between the recording of a financial transaction and its posting in the relevant account. This delay—absent in electronic accounting systems due to nearly instantaneous posting into relevant accounts—is a basic characteristic of manual systems, thus giving rise to primary books of accounts such as Cash Book, Bank Book, Purchase Book, and Sales Book for recording the immediate effect of a financial transaction.

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