An injury and baking cookies brought Kaela Coble to her new career.
When she was an executive assistant at a hospital, she hit her head. Post-concussion syndrome prevented her from using computer screens. While she was not working, she started to bake.
Soon, she had started a cookie bakery out of her home. She did not make much money, she said, but she learned that she could be a business owner. One key ingredient in that realization: She learned how to keep the books for her cookie business.
Now Coble owns her own bookkeeping business. She likes the flexibility that the profession allows, and the subject matter.
“I love everything about the work,” she said. “I love work and I love organization. I love money and talking about money.”
Coble does a wide variety of tasks for her clients. She sets up or cleans up Quickbooks Online files; categorizes their transactions; reconciles their bank accounts, credit cards, payroll, loans, and merchant accounts like Square and Shopify. She runs their balance sheet, profit & loss, and statements of cash flows to make sure everything looks correct and pays their sales taxes.
But she also provides analysis and advice based on the trends generated by the reports she runs to assess the health of their businesses.
Coble works exclusively with women business owners.
“We all have a lot of the same issues around money,” she said. “We’re raised not to talk about money and definitely not to say you want money.”
She likes to empower women to talk about money, to go after money and to charge more for their goods and services, she said.
She looks at their ability to pay debts and analyzes cash flow to see what percentage of gross profit they’re paying themselves, spending on operating expenses and saving for taxes. She tries to incrementally move them to healthier percentages. She sets goals so they are not just more profitable, but making money doing the things they truly love and feel fulfilling to them.
Coble, born in 1983, said she grew up in the last era when girls were told they were not meant for math. “I was always good at math, but for some reason believed I wasn’t because I got A-minuses instead of A-pluses,” she said.
Once her name was out there as a bookkeeper, she did not have to work particularly hard to get people to make what she calls a discovery call — explaining to potential clients what she can do for them. She said two or three potential clients a week sign up to find out more.
She said she now has clients all over the country.
“There’s such a need for bookkeepers,” Coble said. “It’s crazy.”
Vermont’s most promising jobs
Bookkeeping has been flagged by the Vermont Department of Labor and the McClure Foundation as one of Vermont’s most promising jobs — defined by them as jobs that pay more than the median Vermont wage of $22.50 an hour and are expected to have at least 500 openings or more over the next decade.
To draw attention to the opportunities, the organizations are spotlighting the four occupations with the greatest number of projected openings through 2030: bookkeepers, carpenters, nurses and teachers.
VTDigger’s Promising Jobs series is taking up the torch to look more closely at how people are getting into those four careers. Today, we dive into bookkeeping. We’ve previously covered teaching and carpentry. And tomorrow, we’ll cover nursing.
The nonprofit Advance Vermont posts Vermont’s most promising jobs on its website, where people can find out about 500 careers in Vermont and can see what training they need to land a job in one of those careers.
For bookkeeping and accounting clerks, there are expected to be 5,320 openings between 2020 and 2030. The median wage is $23 an hour, or more than $47,000 a year.
About 500 bookkeeping jobs open up in Vermont every year, according to Michael Keogh, director of business engagement at Community College of Vermont.
The bookkeeping profession is a good fit for people who are “organized and detail-oriented” and “like to work with lots of information,” according to a brochure from the McClure Foundation.
“Bookkeeping is a particularly promising job because it requires a relatively short-term career training program” to get into the field, said Carolyn Weir, the foundation’s executive director.
Getting into the profession
Coble got her entry into the field through Bookkeeper Launch, a for-profit online training program for new bookkeepers.
Community College of Vermont has a one-year bookkeeping certificate program, Keogh said. The college also has a bookkeeping apprenticeship program in which employers pay for their employees to get a bookkeeping certificate.
Keogh recommends that young people interested in bookkeeping take financial accounting classes at the community college while they’re still in high school. He also recommends another course the college offers, computerized accounting, which is the QuickBooks class.
As they take those two courses at his college, Keogh said, high school students can earn one certificate for each course from the National Association of Public Bookkeepers. With those courses and certificates, he said, they can probably find jobs when they graduate from high school as entry-level payroll clerks or an accounts payable clerk.
Independent bookkeepers, he said, are making anywhere from $30 to upward of $50 an hour.
But bookkeepers also work for firms.
Robin Ferris Spitzer took what at the time was called recordkeeping in high school, using big paper ledgers that unfolded. She taught herself bookkeeping in the mid-1980s, using her first computer program, a DOS-based program.
She once worked for Green Mountain Coffee, but now works at a small firm, where she does accounts payable, accounts receivable, invoicing and payroll collections. She uses QuickBooks.
“I love numbers,” Ferris Spitzer said. “I like things to come out right.”
Advice to young people
Spitzer’s advice to high school students thinking about this career is: “You’ve got to like numbers. You’ve got to be somewhat organized.”
She thinks the best way for young people to get into the profession is to do it. She recommends that they subscribe to QuickBooks and find a small business to start keeping books for, and learn.
Coble recommends that people interested in bookkeeping set up their own businesses.
“As a freelancer, you can set your own prices and you can make a good amount of money,” she said.
Coble wants young people to know that you don’t have to be a math genius to be a bookkeeper; just be organized and be willing to learn and work hard.
She also likes networking, developing proposals and marketing her business.
“This career is so great for people who have a bit of a creative side and a social side,” she said.
“There’s a common misconception that bookkeepers and accountants are kind of introverted, which the majority are, but you can be an extrovert and still really enjoy this career and you can be creative and still like this career,” Coble said.
