Career Advice: Becoming an Small Business Office IT and Book-keeping Generalist

If you have any problem getting a job, or would like to start your own consulting business, learn Information Technology and Quickbooks, and set up offices to be highly automated and yet possess extremely redundant record-keeping. Many small businesses make very poor use of computers, and have very bad record-keeping. A situation you can set up is where a small business has a full time office lady, and you set her up to work as efficiently as possible, and have a maintenance contract where you charge 15 dollars for a telephone call, and 30 an hour if you have to come to the office. So you are an office trainer and free lance consultant.

There are many details I could go into as to doing redundant book-keeping which I don’t have time to discuss in detail, but I can fill in the details if someone wants to contact me and start their own consulting business.

On the IT side you want to do the A+ and Network+ certification, and the basic Microsoft MCD certification. A full MCSE would be very good, and so would Linux+ though it’s difficult to convince residental and business users to switch to Linux. However, Quickbooks can be ported to Linux. You need to have a backup scheme. Carbonite online backup is a good solution, though I recommend both Carbonite and a local backup. Redundancy is always better.

On the book-keeping side, you want to be a Quickbooks guru. You can learn this by reading and playing with QB and getting a job as a book-keeper for a while. You’ll probably work for a grouchy middle aged lady, but you’ll learn QB. The thing to pay attention to is money coming in. Money going out is all recorded in checks. Money coming in has to be redundantly recorded. For example, you should scan checks and keep the pictures in folders based on the year, and a sub-folder based on the customer. Cash transactions should be kept in Word or Open Office Writer files in the same sub-folders, or if you write cash receipts for the customers, they should be scanned and put in the sub-folders. All this should be backed up every night.

You will help businesses run much better, and you won’t have to spend your days in offices. Your time will be worth decent money. You could be farming, take a call on your cell phone, go inside your house, remote to the office computer, fix their problem, make sure they are happy, record a bill for the call, and go back to your rototiller.

Small office management is all about common sense, and it’s mostly a matter of automation and exquisitely organized and redundant record keeping.

Occidental Dissent, April 14, 2010