What Does a CNA and a Professional Bookkeeper Have in Common?

3 min read

Answer: They both clean up the messes you've made!

I've got a feeling that I am in a pretty elite club. That would be individuals who have earned both their MBA (Master of Business Administration) and their CNA (Certified Nursing Assistant). – More on that journey in another blog post. Having such a varied professional life I believe the biggest messes I've had to clean up were found in folks books rather than in senior's pants!

How Clean Does My Bookkeeping Need to Be?

As Donald Rumsfeld famously said, "…there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know." A question you might be asking now is how clean does my bookkeeping need to be? Let me respond by using a key skill used by CNAs – bathing.

When it comes to cleaning your own body we have different standards depending on the situation. For instance if your mother tells you to "go wash up for dinner" that's probably going to be something like washing your hands and maybe your face. If you are prepping for a hot date you are probably going to jump in the shower and get clean from head to toe. On the other hand if you are a surgeon that is about to go into the operating room you are going to have a very in-depth scrubbing technique that helps to ensure that everything is as sterile as can be because the stakes are so high.

To bring this back to bookkeeping the answer to how clean do your books need to be is going to be something else that is familiar to CNAs – Depends!

In much the same way that all of the various cleaning methods above require soap and water our bookkeeping solutions have some across the board solutions such as having a system like QuickBooks Online and following GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) is the foundation for