Bookkeeper vs accountant or enrolled agent

They all work with financial data. They are not the same job. If you hire the first title that answers the phone, you will either overpay for the wrong skill or find out in April that nobody was watching the thing that mattered.

A growing company often needs more than one of these seats. They work in sequence: the books have to be right before the advice is worth anything, and the advice has to be current when a notice arrives.

What a bookkeeper does

A bookkeeper's primary job is the day-to-day file. Transactions get recorded. Bank and credit-card accounts get reconciled. Bills and invoices stay honest. Payroll may sit here too, if that is in the scope.

The point is a current picture of cash, sales, and expenses — not a strategy memo. Ideally the file is closed on a cadence you can point to, not "when someone gets to it." If you are still doing this yourself, aim for a regular reconciliation, not a shoebox in April. See bookkeeping.

What an accountant does

An accountant takes a file that can stand up and turns it into reports and advice: a profit-and-loss you can read, a balance sheet that is not a surprise, a forecast, a conversation about what the month actually means. This is accounting, not data entry with a nicer title.

You do not only need this once a year. A monthly look at the reports is how you catch a margin problem while you can still do something about it.

What an enrolled agent does

An enrolled agent is a federally authorized tax practitioner, licensed by the IRS, who may represent taxpayers before the IRS. The credential matters when the question stops being "is this categorized?" and becomes "what do we do about this notice?"

Tax preparation, planning, and representation live here. A bookkeeper should not be the person answering an IRS letter. An EA should not be the only person entering last week's expenses, either. Unchained is led by an enrolled agent, Melissa Guy; the file and the tax work sit with the same small team. See Taxes and About.

Who you need

If the books are not closed, start with bookkeeping. If the books are closed and you still cannot tell what the company can afford, you need accounting. If you have a return, a planning question, or a government letter, you need someone who is actually allowed to represent you — an EA or a CPA, not a salesperson.

A short version of how to test a firm is here: How to find an accounting service you can actually rely on.

Fifteen minutes is free. Call (844) 222-9653, or start at unchainedfs.com.