Bookkeeping is the recording of a business's day-to-day financial transactions — sales, purchases, receipts, and payments — so that accurate financial statements can be prepared from them.
Bookkeeping is the transactional layer beneath accounting. Bookkeepers record each transaction in journals and ledgers, today usually inside an accounting system that maintains the 📝General Ledger, and accountants then use those records to produce the 📝Income Statement, the balance sheet, and other reports. Under double-entry bookkeeping every transaction changes at least two accounts, which keeps the books in balance and leaves an audit trail; single-entry bookkeeping records each transaction once, much like a checkbook register.
Modern bookkeeping has shifted from periodic data entry to continuous processing. Accounting systems download bank and card transactions automatically and apply rules to post routine items, leaving people to handle the 📝Bookkeeping Exceptions that need judgment. That shift makes a weekly cadence practical, which 📝Weekly Accounting builds on through the 📝Weekly Bookkeeping Checklist.
State of the art for bookkeeping is to pull transactions from the bank every day into an accounting system and process them efficiently, escalating on an exception basis.