# Interview 04: Ruth Part-time bookkeeper, semi-retired, nine local clients, works from home two mornings a week Date: 23 October 2026 · Phone call · 41 minutes · Invented example interview --- Interviewer: Thanks for speaking with me, Ruth. Could you tell me a little about your work? Ruth: Of course, dear. I was a bookkeeper at a builders' merchant for thirty years, and when I retired I kept a few clients on the side. Now I have nine. A plumber, a farm shop, a florist, a hairdresser, a couple of window cleaners, a small garage. I work Tuesday and Thursday mornings, at my kitchen table. I keep their books every month so their accountant has something tidy at the end of the year. Interviewer: Let's talk about the most recent month you closed. Ruth: That would be September. I finished it last Thursday. I'm always a bit behind because I only do two mornings. Interviewer: Where does a month start for you? Ruth: With a phone call. On the first Tuesday I ring each of them. I'd rather ring than write. I say, have you got your envelope ready? Most of them keep an envelope for me and put the receipts in during the month. Then I drive round and collect them. The farm shop gives me a cup of tea. Interviewer: Do they all have the envelope ready? Ruth: The farm shop always does. She's marvellous. The plumber never does. He keeps his receipts in the van, in the door pocket, and in his jacket. I've stood in his yard while he went through the van looking for them. Interviewer: Have you tried anything to change that? Ruth: My granddaughter set him up with an app on his phone, one where you take a photo of the receipt. He used it for about three weeks. Then he stopped. He said it took longer to photograph a receipt than to lose it. And I didn't like it either. I couldn't see the photos properly on my computer, they came through tiny. Interviewer: What happens to the plumber's missing receipts? Ruth: They go on my list of unknowns. I keep a sheet of paper for each client, and anything in the bank I can't explain goes on it. By January the plumber's unknown sheet has sixty or seventy items, and then it's a scramble before his accountant's deadline. We sit at his kitchen table for an afternoon and go through his bank statement line by line, and half of it he can't remember. Interviewer: How does that afternoon feel? Ruth: Tiring. For both of us. He feels told off, and I feel like I've let him down, even though I asked him every month. Interviewer: Once you have the envelopes, what do you do? Ruth: I tip them out on the table and sort them into piles. Fuel, materials, phone, the odd one. Then I put each pile in date order. I write the account on each receipt in pencil. Some of them are so faded you can't read them at all. Those thermal till receipts, they fade in a month. Interviewer: What do you do with the faded ones? Ruth: I hold them up to the window and guess, mostly. Or I match the amount to the bank and ask the client what it was. It's a nuisance. Interviewer: And then? Ruth: Then I put them into the computer. I use QuickBooks, because the accountants all wanted it. I'm slow at it, I'll be honest. I type everything in by hand. My granddaughter says the bank can feed it in automatically, but I don't trust it. I like to see every line. Interviewer: How do you check the books match the bank? Ruth: I print the bank statement. Paper. And I go down it with a pencil and a ruler and tick every line against what I've entered. When I'm at the bottom and every line is ticked, I know it's right. It takes a while, but I've never had a month that didn't balance in the end. Interviewer: What happens when it doesn't balance straight away? Ruth: I look at the difference. If it's a round number, fifty or a hundred, it's nearly always cash. The garage owner pays cash into the bank and forgets to tell me what it was. If it's an odd number, it's usually me, a typing mistake. I've got quite good at guessing which. Interviewer: Can you give me an example from September? Ruth: The garage was out by two hundred exactly. Round number, so I rang him, and it was a cash deposit from a customer who paid for a service. Ten minutes. If it had been an odd number I'd have been there all morning. Interviewer: And at the end? Ruth: I don't send fancy reports. I print a profit and loss and post it, or I hand it over when I collect the next envelope. Most of them look at the bottom line and nothing else. If it's lower than last month they ask me why, and I tell them. I know their businesses, so I usually know. Interviewer: Is there anything you wish were different? Ruth: I'd like the receipts to come in on time. And I'd like the plumber to stop putting receipts in his van door. Other than that, I'm happy enough. I know there are faster ways of doing it. My granddaughter keeps telling me. I feel a bit of a dinosaur sometimes. Interviewer: Why do you keep doing it? Ruth: Because they're my people. Some of them I've done for fifteen years. They trust me, and I'd hate to hand them to someone who didn't know them.