If you are a home school family, make bookkeeping and accounting part of your high school curriculum.
UPDATED FOR CORONA-QUARANTINE 2020! Turns out ALL of us are home school families!
This post is mostly for home school families, though perhaps some folks with teens in traditional school might be inspired to figure out a way to integrate a bookkeeping curriculum into their family brain trust.
Or if your children are home from school for the Corona Virus outbreak in spring of 2020, you are now a home school family! Turns out it High School work really only takes a few hours even though your children are gone to school most of the day when school is open. What in the world are they going to do with all this free time!?!
So, you are wanting to start a bookkeeping business. Why not let your teen learn along side you?
Are you wanting to use the extra idle time from kids being home from school to teach them to learn a great skill that they can turn into a real, high paying part time job?
I personally took Bookkeeper Business Launch and think that would be fabulous for a parent and child to do together. Read my full review here.
But there are lots of other courses that would be a great investment for your child. I have an entire article about how to DECIDE which course. Don’t make the decision harder than it has to be. And I’ve reviewed many, many other bookkeeping courses.
If you have any questions about courses, please come to the Bookkeeping Side Hustle Facebook Group. Or shoot an email to bookkeepingsidehustle@gmail.com or comment below. I consider myself an expert at the current “bookkeeping business education” space. Feel free to tap my brain.
At the very least, you could also have your child complete the AccountingCoach.com modules. This won’t teach them any entrepreneurship, but it would be a great free way to teach them the basics.
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Let’s list some pros and cons to this strategy
Pros
- Spread the cost of education over 2 or more people. You (the adult) learn and your teen learns a valuable technical skill. A bookkeeping course might seem costly for just yourself, but what if you thought of half (or more, depending on how many kids you will put through it) of the cost as going towards your home school education budget? And maybe also decreasing your college expenses because maybe your kids’ college will let them test out of Accounting 101.
- Built in “team” for your business. Your teen is your first helper in your thriving new business and you know that he knows what to do because you’ve learned together. Don’t feel like doing the tedious reconciliations? Junior can click that mouse all day long. He already does.
- If your teen catches the entrepreneurial bug, she can form her own bookkeeping firm when he goes to college. Much better on that post-college resume than “Barista”. Shoot, maybe you set them on the path to always be an entrepreneur and they don’t have to go to the college career center to get help with that dreaded resume.
Cons
- Hmmm…well, the only one I can think of is that it might be insufferable to be a student along side you teenager. When I was a teen, me and my big mouth and big hair definitely “knew it all”, so I probably would have wanted to thump me on the head if I had been my parent trying to learn a new discipline and start a business with my child.
A bookkeeping business curriculum would be a great fit in a homeschool family that wants to foster entrepreneurship in the entire household.
Do you think that a bookkeeping business curriculum would fit well for a home schooled high schooler and the parents who also want to learn this business? Comment below.
