1. Real vs. Nominal Unit of Measure:
An accountant deals with nominal accounting, which means that all transactions are recorded at face value (i.e., the actual amount of money received or paid for something).
2. Revenues vs. Expenses:
Bookkeepers only work with revenues and expenses while accountants may need to separate those two types of transactions into distinct accounts depending on what is being purchased or sold.
For example, property tax is revenue that appears on the income statement while interest expense would be listed as an operating expense on the income statement.
3. Assets vs. Liabilities:
Rather than recording transactions on both sides of the balance sheet as they occur, bookkeepers only record those transactions on the left-hand side (i.e., the assets section).
Accountants must be able to work with both sides of a company's ledger and understand how those different accounts interact within the accounting equation across time as well as within the current reporting period.
In summary, a bookkeeper is a person who records the financial transactions of a single company while an accountant works with multiple companies and needs to be able to analyze a variety of accounts that come from different sources.