What a Bookkeeper Actually Does for a Canadian Business
A bookkeeper records what your business does with money — every sale, every bill, every payment — and keeps the documents that prove it. They reconcile your accounts against the bank, chase what is unpaid, and hand your accountant a set of books that is already current. They do not decide your tax position, and they do not take the responsibility for the records off you.
General information as at 2026, not tax advice. Confirm your own situation with your accountant or the Canada Revenue Agency.
Who does what, and what stays yours
| The work | Usually the bookkeeper | Usually the accountant | Always you |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recording sales, bills and payments as they happen | Yes | No | — |
| Reconciling the accounts against the bank | Yes | No | — |
| Keeping receipts and invoices that support each entry | Yes | No | — |
| Producing the year's figures for the return | Prepares them | Works from them | — |
| Filing the return and advising on tax | No | Yes | — |
| Keeping the records the law requires | — | — | Yes |
That last row is the one most people get wrong, and it is worth the rest of this page.
What the work actually looks like
Most of a bookkeeper's week is small and repetitive, which is exactly why it gets deferred. Sales go in as they are invoiced rather than when someone remembers. Supplier bills are entered and matched to what was actually delivered. Payments are applied against the right invoice, so the list of who owes you money stays true. Expenses are coded to the right account, because a year of everything landing in "general" is a year your accountant has to unpick.
Then reconciliation: the accounts as recorded are compared against the bank and the card statements, line by line, until the two agree. This is the step that catches the double-entered bill and the payment that never cleared. A set of books that has never been reconciled is a set of guesses arranged in columns.
And underneath all of it, the documents. The CRA is specific about this. Its guidance says plainly: "Always get receipts or other vouchers when you buy something for your business", and a receipt has to show the date of the purchase, the name and address of the seller or supplier, the name and address of the buyer, the full description of the goods or services, and the vendor's business number if they are a GST/HST registrant and the purchase price is $100 or more before tax (Business records, as at 2026). Income records carry their own minimum: "Your income records must include the date, amount, and source of the income."
Where bookkeeping stops and accounting begins
The question behind bookkeeper or accountant is usually a budget question, and it has a cleaner answer than most comparisons of the two suggest: they are sequential, not alternative.
What separates accounting from bookkeeping is not difficulty but direction. Bookkeeping is the recording — what happened, in what amount, supported by what document. Accounting is the interpretation and the filing that follows — the year-end adjustments, the treatment decisions, the return itself, and the advice about what any of it means for you.
So the order matters more than the choice. An accountant working from books that were never reconciled spends the first part of the engagement reconstructing the year before they can begin the work you are paying them for. Current records make that engagement shorter and its output more reliable. If you can only fund one, funding the recording first is what makes the second one worth buying.
What the CRA requires of the records themselves
Two obligations sit on the business, whoever does the keying.
The first is that they exist at all. The CRA's wording is not a recommendation: "You are required by law to keep records of all your transactions to support your income and expense claims" (Business records, as at 2026).
The second is that they survive. "You are generally required to keep your records for a minimum of six years from the end of the last tax year to which they relate" (same page, as at 2026). Six years from the end of the tax year they relate to — not six years from today, which is a longer window than it first sounds, and it covers the receipts as well as the ledger. What the CRA accepts as a record, and what an audit actually asks for, is set out in more detail in our guide to CRA bookkeeping requirements.
Who is responsible if the records are wrong
This is the part no job description mentions and the part that decides how you should think about hiring at all.
Handing the work to someone else does not hand over the obligation. On electronic record keeping, the CRA states it directly: "A person who keeps records electronically is not relieved of any of the record keeping, readability, retention, and access responsibilities because he or she contracts out the record keeping function to a third party such as a bookkeeper, accountant, an Internet transaction manager, an application service provider, an Internet service provider, or through a time share, service bureau, or other such arrangements" (IC05-1R1 Electronic Record Keeping, paragraph 19, under "Use of third party service providers").
That sentence is about records kept electronically, which today is most of them. Read it for what it is: you can contract out the keying, the reconciling and the filing away. You cannot contract out being the person the CRA asks.
Practically, that changes what you are shopping for. The question is not only "will this person do the work" but "will I be able to see that it was done" — whether the records are readable, retained and accessible without depending on one person's memory or one person's laptop.
When a business actually needs one
Nobody needs a bookkeeper on day one, and plenty of very small businesses run for years on a spreadsheet and a shoebox without coming to harm.
The point it stops working is usually structural rather than dramatic. The receipts arrive faster than they are filed. The bank balance and the spreadsheet stop agreeing and nobody has time to find out why. Year-end takes weeks instead of days, and the accountant's first invoice is larger than expected because the first half of their work was archaeology.
What happens to the entries nobody can classify
Some entries genuinely cannot be decided from the bank line alone. A payment to a venue could be a client meeting, a staff event or a room rental, and each belongs in a different account.
On the Bookkeeping Service, that is handled rather than guessed: when the software is not confident, the entry does not post — it goes to a review queue worked by a trained reviewer on our staff, who opens the source document and decides the treatment.
Frequently asked questions
What does a bookkeeper do day-to-day? Records sales, bills and payments as they occur, codes expenses to the right accounts, keeps the supporting receipts and invoices, and reconciles the accounts against the bank and card statements.
What is the difference between a bookkeeper and an accountant? Bookkeeping is the recording; accounting is the interpretation and the filing built on top of it. Most businesses end up using both, in that order.
Is a bookkeeper higher than an accountant? Neither is above the other — they are different jobs at different points in the same sequence. The bookkeeper produces the record; the accountant works from it.
What does a bookkeeper do for a small business specifically? The same work, at smaller volume, with a bigger effect: for a small business the bookkeeper is usually the only thing standing between the year's receipts and a year-end reconstruction.
If I hire a bookkeeper, am I off the hook for the records? No. The CRA's electronic record-keeping guidance says contracting the function out to a bookkeeper or accountant does not relieve you of the record keeping, readability, retention and access responsibilities.
If the answer is that you need the work done
Knowing what the job involves is usually the easy half. The harder question is whether to employ somebody to do it or buy the outcome, and the answer moves with how much is coming through the door.
That decision is laid out in full on outsourced bookkeeping services, including what changes when you send documents instead of managing a person: you send receipts and invoices, and the records come back kept, with no employee to recruit, manage or make payroll contributions for. Worth being clear about the boundary, though — we do not file your tax returns, and we do not give tax, legal or financial advice. What you owe, and what you claim, stays between you and your accountant.