Both my parents run small businesses. While growing up I had to help my dad with the accounts. He used to have shoe boxes of receipts and invoices and my job was to get these into excel and then organise this for the accountants and the dreaded bank manager. I hated it!
After growing up with the volatility of my parents’ businesses I yearned for a more ‘stable’ career. So, I spent 15 years in finance and consulting. But 100 days ago, I channelled some of my parents’ entrepreneurial spirit by joining Validis as CEO.
In this role, I’m finally working to resolve some of the issues I faced with my dad. Validis allows SMEs to upload their financial accounting data directly to banks and accountants. On average we save auditors 8 hours per audit and financial institutions 75% of the data processing time. That’s over 50k hours saved since I joined! Most importantly, it takes SMEs seconds to send their data and can be refreshed at the click of a button.
100 days in I’m really enjoying getting to know the team and hearing from our customers about the impact we’re having. But on a personal level I love how we make it easier for SMEs to get faster lending decisions and easily transfer their accounting data.
Now I just need to find a tool to help me sort through shoeboxes of invoices…