Clients often ask me how I got started bookkeeping. Honestly, I don’t remember not bookkeeping. My grandfather was a contractor with his own business. My grandmother kept the household and business books separate and down to the penny, on paper. I was writing out bank deposit slips by the age of 6 as well as helping her make entries in her books tracking everything deposited and spent. My parents each had their own businesses by the time I was twelve as well as owned multiple rental properties. My mother did all of the personal and business bookkeeping and taxes which I helped with.

By age 13, my mother would hand me a stack of bills to pay, the checkbook to balance and the bank statements to reconcile. When I first asked her how to reconcile a bank statement, she told me to read the directions on the back. I worked in a flower shop in high school doing all of the their accounts payable and receivable. In college, I was involved in developing online education programs. After college I worked as an Office Administrator for a small company developing online education classes. One day, the owner came in with a box full of paper and asked if I could put everything in the box on Quicken for her CPA. Once I did, her CPA recommended that she hire someone to train me on QuickBooks so that I could do her bookkeeping for all her companies. She hired a woman with a MA in accounting at $90/hr in 1999 to train me.

When the company I worked for moved to Virginia, I called another woman who was an independent bookkeeper who kept our books while I was on maternity leave. Instead of hiring me, she told me to start my own bookkeeping business, so I did. She referred clients to me and within 6 months, I had more work than I could handle. Now after over 20 years in business, I have serviced clients all over the country remotely catering to the particular needs of their business.