What's the Real Picture? Who is the face of LDG?
If you're wondering what I look like, well, you're probably already on my LinkedIn or Facebook page, right? But let's not get bogged down in the literal answer. I'm posing this question to reflect on the typical image of a "bookkeeper" and how it might be changing.
According to the Federal government, employed bookkeepers are quite atypical. About 91% of us are female, with an average age of 48, working around 35% of a full-time load, and earning an average weekly income of $1304.
Interestingly, this survey predicts a slight decline in demand for employed bookkeepers in the next few years. The catch here is that the study focuses on employed bookkeepers, making it harder to gather information on self-employed bookkeepers. However, if we look at the Institute of Certified Bookkeepers' (ICB) 2020 survey, bookkeepers (including self-employed) are around 53 years old, with 89% likely to be female.
That means that you as a small business are not employing a bookkeeper on your staff, you're hiring someone like me as you need us.
The biggest shift, according to the ICB, is that bookkeepers are now more likely to refer to themselves as BAS Agents rather than bookkeepers. Additionally, more bookkeepers, like all Australian workers, have moved away from capital cities in the last few years. The ICB attributes this to a greater uptake in cloud software, which makes perfect sense – we can now do bookkeeping from virtually anywhere.
Amazingly, more bookkeepers are teaming up to become more than just sole traders, with a 27% increase in multi-person bookkeeping practices from 2019 to 2020.
So, if technology, collaboration, and the evolving age profile of the bookkeeping industry are anything to go by, it looks like the bookkeeping industry is ripe for a millennial takeover.
Personally, I would welcome that.
Millennials embody everything I think is great about self-employed bookkeeping and more. They love tech, are entrepreneurial, value flexible work arrangements, and seek value adding in their work life.
Even though I've been in this game for such a long time, being a self-employed bookkeeper has given me all those things. With my own children all in their 20s but having grown up around my career, maybe LDG is destined to become a multi-generational business...?
Watch this space ...
