Can you suggest where to begin studying and getting started? I'm interested.
3 full time jobs, all in accounting?
I'm self taught and it was basically just learning as I went.
QuickBooks is pretty user friendly. I used youtube and google.
I would begin by learning both A/P and A/R and taking it from there. The cycle of creating a vendor, entering the invoice, filing the invoice, printing the check to pay the invoice, etc. When entering a bill you'll also assign a various expense account to it (i.e. a gas bill is going under utilities).
Then creating a client, creating invoices/estimates for the client, receiving and entering payment from the client. If you purchase material for a client's job you'd assign that purchase to their account or job and there you go, you have the expense vs the billed revenue. Add in payroll expense and there's your profitability.
That's the basic foundation for bookkeeping and seriously could be learned in a few days.
Beyond that you begin becoming familiar with QB and running various reports. Begin understanding the P/L. All revenue, COGS and expenses will show. But now that you're already entering all invoices/bills going in/out, you'll understand it.
You'll then want to learn how to reconcile, import bank files into QB and mark the charges off against the bank statements.
A bookkeeper will be asked many times to run payroll and we use ADP as platform. But it's pretty simply.
After that you get into higher level stuff but if the data has been entered you're just running and analyzing reports for the most part. Job costing, tax items, reviewing the ledger, pulling reports for audits, etc. Most companies will have a CPA you'd be able to lean on.
The thing about accounting is I think it's the most logical and rational skill to learn. It's just organizing and understanding the numbers you're looking at.
