For small business owner Aaron Reid, what started out in 2003 as a way to combine working from home and taking care of young children has blossomed into a full-fledged, award-winning professional services business 15 years later.
Earlier this year Reid’s home-based bookkeeping firm, Banking On It Bookkeeping, took the next step in its development at a place of its own. The company moved out of the basement and into its new Duncan Street office.
“It's been a really positive experience,” says Aaron. “It's nice to have the business out of my home so I can try to separate them a little bit.”
Being home-based may be feasible for companies as they are starting out, but there comes a time to re-examine whether that is still working, says Aaron.
“We were getting so busy and my neighbours didn't seem to mind, but I was feeling guilty about how much traffic we were getting on our street,” she explains. “The move has just created a much more professional environment for my staff.”
By all accounts, things are working out for the small but growing firm. In 2017 the company won the Powell River Chamber of Commerce Business Award for Best Home-based Business and won again this year, this time for Best Professional Services.
“The response from my customers has been overwhelmingly positive,” adds Aaron. “They love the new space, the colours, and the professionalism.”
She adds that she appreciates she no longer has employees and customers watching her walk around her backyard in gumboots with her ducks on Sunday afternoons.
“It has just separated home from work, which is nice,” she adds.
Reid is a Certified Professional Bookkeeper and currently manages a staff of two that includes Bookkeeper Jessica Hitt and Front-Desk Administrator Krista Corbett.
"It's just the three of us right now," says Aaron.
Reid has been looking to add new employees. For the past few years, she has been searching for the right person, another full-cycle bookkeeper, to hire to help manage the company’s growing clientele, but that has been a challenge, she says.
Banking On It Bookkeeping specializes in providing month-to-month bookkeeping and payroll services for its clients. The company requires that its customers, which are primarily small businesses, have either a separate accountant or a professional tax preparer.
The company is mostly paperless and offers customers use of its secure cloud-based file cabinet and file backup from servers located in Canada, says Aaron. Customers can have access to their files and the system makes preparing for year-ends a lot easier, she adds.
There are, however, still a lot of customers who are old-school and bundle up their papers and drop them at the office every month.
“That’s fine, too,” she says.
Although the company provides bookkeeping services to its customers, it takes a very individualized approach in meeting client needs, she says.
“We're really different for each of our customers. We tailor our service,” she explains. “Some want us to do more, others want us to do less.”
According to Aaron, Banking On It Bookkeeping provides services for a range of different companies.
“We have a one-person operation that has very little paperwork to deal with, but they don't want to deal with it so we do that for them,” she explains. “Then we have larger companies, one with 25 employees, and they are really busy and they have a person in their office who handles day-to-day paperwork, but at the end of the month we take all of that compile and reconcile it. We get everything ready right up to year-end to go off to the accountant.”
Whatever the size of the business or its needs, Banking On It Bookkeeping takes care of the details, freeing up customers so they can spend more time taking care of what’s really important: their business.
Banking On It Bookkeeping is located at 7095C Duncan Street and is open from 9:30 am to 5 pm Monday to Friday. For more information about how Banking On It can assist, go to bankingonit.ca, call toll-free at 1.877.677.4566 or email the team at info@bankingonit.ca.
