Bookkeeping is the ongoing recording of financial transactions: categorizing income and expenses, reconciling accounts. Accounting is the higher-level work built on top of that, turning those records into financial statements, tax strategy, and real decisions.
Bookkeeping is the input layer: every transaction categorized correctly, every account reconciled to the bank and card statements, done monthly instead of left to pile up. Accounting builds on clean bookkeeping to produce something a founder, investor, or the IRS can actually use: a real income statement, a tax return, a diligence-ready data room.
The two get lumped together in casual conversation, but the distinction matters when a company decides what to outsource and when. A backlog of uncategorized transactions is the single most common thing that turns diligence into a scramble, and it's a bookkeeping problem, not an accounting one. Cheap to prevent, expensive to fix on a deadline.
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