If you’ve been following from the beginning, you might know me as one of our earliest hires, starting with a mix of office and warehouse work, moving to customer service, and ultimately into accounts. I’d had my eye on accounting work well before I started at Book Hero (and mentioned that in my interview, even if they forgot completely about it until months later).
Since I was tiny, I remember counting and counting and re-counting the small amount of cash I had (I still love doing cash-up), and my father took great joy in teaching us about negotiating interest rates on $1 and $2 loans. It truly didn’t occur to me until years later that there was no need for an adult to borrow $2 off a child driving a hard bargain, 50c of interest a day, and then only paying it back 3 days later. What a steal. My sister and I would get $1 for unloading the dishwasher, and once we had enough saved up, Dad would deposit our small sums into our accounts, with the promise that anything we chose to save he would double. Wish that deal still held up today.
By the time I was 17 I had moved onto contract gardening, where I had to send off invoices and record my expenses. At 18, I paid my very first tax return, with the notable distinction of not knowing I also had to file it, and was pinged with a $50.00 late fine. I figured out how to file my tax return, and then had some very stressful phone calls with ACC figuring out why I was charged a 30% levy on my earnings (make sure you register your business correctly as part-time or full-time!). By my last tax return I had figured out how to use Excel in a semi-efficient manner, and the whole thing went very smoothly (thank you Excel for Dummies).
Within Book Hero I started with invoicing, moved onto basic bookkeeping admin, and now I’m proud to be our Accounts Hero. I currently manage our accounts payable and receivables, payroll, and month-end accounting processes, with a side of anything else that gets thrown my way.
In my own time, I’d like to start researching investing properly, and I’ve been slowly gathering book recommendations and paying attention to our most popular finance books. Top of my list are Friends that Invest and the Rich Dad series, with a small shout out for Morgan Housel’s The Psychology of Money and The Art of Spending Money. Please send me any of your recommendations, I always love to learn more!
