# Interview 06: Amara Bookkeeper in a three-person firm, works part-time three days a week, closes 20 clients of her own Date: 4 November 2026 · Video call · 50 minutes · Invented example interview --- Interviewer: Thanks for joining, Amara. Tell me about your work. Amara: I work for a small firm, three of us. I'm part-time, Monday to Wednesday, because of my kids. I have twenty clients that are mine. I do everything for them, from the first document to the report at the end. The owner of the firm signs off on year-ends, but the monthly close is mine. Interviewer: Which month did you close most recently? Amara: I'm in the middle of October right now. September is done. Let's talk about September, it's fresher in a good way. Interviewer: How does a month start for you? Amara: Sales tax decides it. Eight of my clients file sales tax monthly, and I prepare those returns, so they go first, every month, no matter what. Then the ones with payroll. Then everybody else. I write the order on a sticky note on my screen on the first Monday. That's my plan. Interviewer: And the documents? Amara: The firm sends the request emails for everybody on the first. After that, chasing is down to me. The problem is my days. If a client sends things on a Thursday afternoon, I don't see them until Monday. And if I need an answer from them and they reply on Thursday, I've lost four days. Being part-time, the waiting hurts more. Interviewer: Tell me about the waiting in September. Amara: I had a client, a small catering company, with about thirty transactions I couldn't place. Card payments to places I didn't recognise. I send a list for those. It's a spreadsheet with the date, the amount, what the bank says, and an empty column for the client to tell me what it was. I sent it on the Monday, and it came back the next Tuesday. Eight days for thirty answers. And five of them still said "not sure". Interviewer: What did you do with the five? Amara: Put them in a suspense account. Which I hate, because suspense is just a place where problems wait for year-end. Interviewer: Have you tried other ways of getting those answers? Amara: I tried phoning instead of sending the list. On the phone they say "let me check and call you back", and then they never call back. And I had nothing in writing, so I'd forget which ones I'd asked about. I went back to the list after a couple of months. At least with the spreadsheet the questions and the answers are in one place. Interviewer: How do you sort the documents once they arrive? Amara: The hard part for me is personal spending. A lot of my clients use one card for everything. The business card buys groceries, petrol, a holiday. So for every receipt I'm asking: is this the business? I have a rule of thumb. Supermarkets are personal unless they tell me otherwise. Hardware stores are business. Restaurants I ask about. It's not perfect. Interviewer: Has it gone wrong? Amara: Last year a client's holiday went in as travel expenses. Flights, hotel. The accountant caught it, thank goodness, but it was embarrassing. Now I ask about anything travel. Interviewer: How do you know when you have everything? Amara: When the questions list is empty and every bank line has something behind it. Then I record and reconcile. We're on Xero at the firm. For my clients reconciling is mostly fine, because the questions list has done the hard work already. Interviewer: What happens when the reconciliation doesn't match? Amara: Usually it's something I did. A transfer between two of the client's accounts that I recorded as an expense in one and forgot in the other. When it's a big difference I start from the last month that was right and work forward week by week. It can take a couple of hours. The worst is when it goes back to a month I already closed, because then the client's report for that month was wrong too. Interviewer: Tell me about the report. Amara: I send a short report and a summary, and then the questions come. The most common question by far is, "I made a profit, so why is there no money in the bank?" I've written that explanation so many times. Loan repayments, stock, money the owner took out. It's always the same few reasons, but I have to find which ones it is for that client, that month, and then write it in a way they understand. Interviewer: How long does that take? Amara: For one client, half an hour sometimes. I have a document with my best explanations, and I copy from it. That saves me a bit. Interviewer: How did the document start? Amara: After the fifth time I wrote the same paragraph about loan repayments. Now it has maybe twenty explanations in it. Cash versus profit, why sales tax isn't income, why buying a van doesn't show as a cost. I tweak the numbers and send it. Interviewer: How do you feel about the part-time setup? Amara: I love it, mostly. But the first week of the month, when I'm off on Thursday and Friday, I can feel the emails piling up. I check my phone at the playground. I don't want to, but I do. Interviewer: What would make the biggest difference? Amara: Answers. Getting answers from clients faster. The bookkeeping I can do. It's the waiting.