Do I Need To Get Certified?

Anybody who is offering a certification will of course tell you that you need one. Preferably their own!

But do you really need a bookkeeping certification?

To break it down very practically my first answer would be no. You don't NEED a bookkeeping certification. There is no requirement to have it and you can certainly make a good living as a bookkeeper without one.

By the time I learned about the Intuit QuickBooks Certifications I had already begun to build a nice practice with a number of clients. This was in 2006. I thought about taking the exam but since I was busy all week seeing clients, I figured I would do it on a weekend. Then a Sunday came when I sat down to work on the certification. At that time there were (I think) 3 exams you had to pass. I passed the first one. It took me several hours. In those days I was billing by the hour, so I literally could have made money billing clients if I had instead spent that time working on clients.

That was when I decided to forget about certification. I resolved that if things ever slowed down and I needed the certification to help me get more clients, then I would do it.

For a long time I did not get certified. In fact it was not until I was invited by Intuit to join their Trainer Writer Network (TWN) that I got certified because I needed to in order to join TWN.

SO here's my final answer on whether or not you need to or should get certified:

If it will help you do it!

Why would it help you?

In some cases it's just about confidence. Getting certified can give you the confidence you need so that when you talk to prospects you are more likely to get them as clients.

The other reason is marketing. If you look at some bookkeeper's websites they have the certification badges plastered all over their website. You begin to wonder if they have any time for doing the actual work! If having a certification badge on your site is going to make the difference between getting a client and not, then do it.

Also as to which certifications to get, I would definitely recommend getting certified in QuickBooks Online. When you do, you get listed in the Find a Proadvisor site and while some people report that they’ve gotten nothing from it, many people report that they get a lot of business from it. Some have even claimed they’ve built their entire business off of their Find A Proadvisor Listing.