How to Start a Successful Home-Based Freelance Bookkeeping and Tax Preparation Business [Paperback]

This books certainly contains some helpful information if you're going to start you own bookkeeping business, but 3 major things make me recommend you think twice before purchasing this book:

1. To say frankly, this books is about starting ANY professional service business, not just bookkeeping. It certainly refers to some accounting topics - i.e. choosing accounting software etc., but essentially it gives you no idea about how to build competitive advantage of your bookkeeping business and doesn't tell you any ins and outs of this particular business type
2. This books is poorly edited - it has two authors and it looks like these authors wrote different part of the books and nobody took time to make sure that the book is cohesive and doesn't say the same ideas twice. Pictures in this book just magnify the impression of a poor editor work - they are absolutely not stylish and resemble the standard picture set of MS Word in 1990s. This is certainly not to say that poor editing will preclude you from understanding what this book is about, but I expected much more from the item priced at $40.
3. Talking about "Tax preparation" part of this book, the whole content of this chapter can be put into one sentence "At some point of time in developing your bookkeeping business, you might find it interesting to expand your services into tax preparation field". Well, this looks too simplistic to me - taxation is one of the most complicated areas of finance and just to say that sometimes you will wake up and decide to get into this field and next morning you will be there is just odd.

To put is short, if this book cost $15 and were titled "A couple of nice ideas about getting into the world of services business", I would certainly give it 5 star. But a combination of this book's actual name and its $40 cost only earns a 3 star rating.

I am an MBA/CPA and must wave a caution flag and DO NOT recommend this book. I purchased this book because I am considering starting my own practice and wanted to avoid mistakes of others. This book is a step in the wrong direction and let me explain why:

First, the recommendations are VERY general. For example, "to start a home bookkeeping business you need BASIC bookkeeping skills." I hope so! I hope that business starters also know a bit more about bookkeeping than the BASICS!

Second, the author suggests during tough times to start selling items.... such as a printer!!! WOW! A financial advisor's nightmare!

Last (and I could go on and on), the authors use this book as an opportunity to promote there other books and organizations. Pinheiro uses the book as promotion for her EA Review course - which I would be highly skeptical of.

To conclude from the authorship of this book, please spend your $40 on another investment to develop your skills. The lack of professionalism also makes me question the success of their personal business endeavors. In no way am I trying to offend the authors, but they should be held to much higher standard if they are going to be any respectable authority on bookkeeping!!!

I found the book to be very informative.It is a common sense, no nonsense read.I am sure it will be very helpful to many just starting out.It makes it so much easier to have all the steps laid out for you and organized.
The tax prep chapter is good and,as a tax preparer,I am so pleased they clearly stated you need to take a tax prep class with an established company prior to doing taxes.Please,please do not try to do taxes without training.Not only will you lose your business but you can get very stiff penalties from IRS if you do not know what you are doing.
My only negative is the glue.It really needs a better glue.I solved this by using a hole punch and putting the pages in a binder.Other than that I would have given it 5 stars.