Bookkeeper, Accountant or CPA — Who Does What
These three are not interchangeable, they are not competitors, and most small businesses eventually use more than one. Here is the actual division of labour.
The short version
A bookkeeper records what happened. An accountant interprets it. A CPA is licensed, and that licence unlocks things the other two cannot do.
Most owners need the first one continuously and the others occasionally. Hiring the most expensive one to do the most routine work is a common and costly mistake.
What a bookkeeper does
Records transactions, reconciles bank and card accounts, maintains the ledger, issues invoices and chases them, enters bills, runs payroll where engaged to, files sales tax returns where engaged to, and produces monthly statements.
This is the recurring, deadline-driven work that keeps a business legible to itself. It is also the work that, left undone, makes everything downstream more expensive.
What an accountant adds
Takes the records and turns them into decisions: analysis, budgeting and forecasting, entity and structure questions, tax planning through the year rather than in April, and preparing financial statements for a lender or an investor.
An accountant without clean books is doing archaeology first and advice second, and you are paying advisory rates for the archaeology.
What the CPA licence specifically unlocks
A Certified Public Accountant holds a state licence with education, examination and experience requirements behind it. That licence is what allows audit and attestation work, and it carries formal standing to represent a client before the IRS.
If a bank, an investor or a buyer asks for audited or reviewed statements, that is CPA territory and nobody else can do it. For routine monthly bookkeeping, the licence is not what you are paying for.
What this means in Florida specifically
Florida has no state personal income tax, which leads some owners to assume there is little to file. There usually is. A business may still owe sales tax if it sells taxable goods or services, reemployment tax once it has employees, and corporate income tax depending on how it is structured. An annual report is filed with the Division of Corporations each year to keep the entity active.
Short-term rental owners have an extra layer, because county tourist development tax applies alongside state sales tax and the two are administered separately.
None of that is exotic. It is simply more than 'no income tax' suggests, and it is the sort of thing that is cheap to handle monthly and expensive to reconstruct.
Which one to hire first
Almost always the bookkeeper. Clean, current records make every other professional cheaper and faster, and they are what you need when a decision, a lender or a deadline arrives without warning.