Hi, my name is Alissa, and my journey to BGL has been quite an interesting one…
At 21, after completing a qualification in Event Management, which turned out, wasn’t quite for me, I found myself working in retail. It was during this time that I decided to further my education and get myself a degree. My love for processes and numbers, made accounting an obvious choice. Fast forward three years, and I had successfully completed a Bachelor of Commerce majoring in Accounting.
Even with my degree now under my belt, I still felt a bit apprehensive about entering the corporate office environment, and as such, deferred starting my accounting journey, instead opting to teach children to swim, whilst also training as a development manager. Although I loved my time working with children, the travel eventually became too much (Beaumaris to Caroline Springs – everyday!) and I felt I was ready to join the accounting industry.
“Straight away, my passion for process naturally drew me into the SMSF space.”
I was fortunate enough to be introduced to a small boutique-chartered firm, which is where my accounting journey began. Straight away, my passion for process naturally drew me into the SMSF space, which is where I predominantly focused my time, also dabbling in Business Services and commencing my CA studies. I was largely involved in the firm’s migration from BGL’s Simple Fund Desktop Product to their cloud-based solution, Simple Fund 360. This change enabled me to focus on new processes, increasing automation, and improving efficiency, thus being in a position to really come up with ways that we could display client information in an engaging way, and focus time that ordinarily would have been spent completing compliance jobs, in adding value to the client.
It was during this time that I attended BGL’s RegTech conference, and the atmosphere, general excitement and passion at this particular event really resonated with me. This got me thinking about my career, and the direction in which I wanted to go. Whilst I loved my SMSF clients, and I really enjoyed working with the team, my true passion was the process, and because of this I made the decision, having just completed my Graduate Diploma of Chartered Accounting (CA) to move out of the chartered accounting space, and across to BGL.
It was here, at BGL, that I realised the combination of hands-on experience using the product, the knowledge of how a firm operates and the technical understanding that I possessed, put me in a unique position of being able to not only understand the questions faced by clients when contemplating a software change, but also ways to overcome them, and really emphasised features of the products that make BGL an obvious choice.
I now look forward to expanding my contact base, working with the various product teams within BGL and engaging with a wider audience to discuss various topics, from product updates, tips & tricks to best practice methods.
Here comes the next part of my journey….
