SHE GOES from house to house and business to business offering clients a personalized service.
However, there is one main challenge: insufficient time in a day for Evelyn Forde, 36, to get all she wants done with her clients.
Forde is the managing director of QB Med Inc., a QuickBooks support centre that offers services such as accounting, bookkeeping, technical support, training, software and hardware, among other supplies.
QuickBooks is an accounting software program that allows users to easily manage business operations and do accounting. It is used mostly by small businesses.
“We deal with all businesses because it is not limited to small business only. We also provide training for institutions as well. For businesses we do personalized [on-site] training to individual businesses and we train individuals as well,” explained Forde.
She started her operation over eight years ago as a mobile service. QB Meds Inc. currently employs two full-time employees. Some of the services are subcontracted.
“Each year we have been doing better and better and provide more services to our clients. In expanding we now have a facility where [clients] can come to us as well. But our primary concept is a mobile one,” she said.
“The main challenge for me is time. There is never enough time to accomplish what I have to do. Directly relating to QuickBooks, the main challenge I have is that self-taught individuals are harder to convert into doing things correctly. It is hard to convince them that there is a better way or a preferred way. The disadvantage of that is that they are not able to maximize on the features of the QuickBooks,” explained Forde.
The certified QuickBooks pro-advisor explained that she was prompted to start her own business after working for an accounting firm and realizing there was a need for more education on maximizing the use of the program.
“The accounting firm had a trade show. That was when QuickBooks first came on the market and I didn’t know anything much about it. But my boss asked me, about six weeks into the business, to do the trade show and I took the challenge.
“I was successful at it and that just prompted me to start this. They were not offering what I am offering now and that is how I started my niche market. Clients would call me and ask me stuff. So it is through helping other clients that helped me to develop QB Med,” explained Forde.
The current Certified General Accountant student said although she moved to her Fontabelle, St Michael location in April this year, most of her clients still preferred her to take the services to them.
“In this market don’t mind we have a lot of mobile technology people are still thirsty for a personalized service where they can interact with a person as oppose to a machine per se,” she added.
Forde told BARBADOS BUSINESS AUTHORITY that she was currently in the process of developing an app for the local market.
“What we are trying to launch now is an app, QuickBooks Mobile, where you can actually do your invoicing and manage your customer base on any mobile device. There is a high demand for it. However, there is still work to be done in sensitizing users about what is available locally,” said Forde.
“In the local market this product is mainly designed for the United States, the UK and Canadian region, so the support that is available in those regions is not available here and that is why we play the part we play as well. We are focused on the region and able to support them because most of the support available is US and UK-based and not targeting the needs of the Caribbean,” added Forde, noting that one of her objectives was to be the number one provider of QuickBooks training and services not only in Barbados but the rest of the region.
“We are hoping that in the near future we will be able to franchise the operations into other parts of the Caribbean. What I ideally would like to do . . . is to develop a programme where I can go into learning institutions and help to regulate how QuickBooks is being taught.
“There are a lot of people teaching the QuickBooks but they are self-taught and are not teaching it in a way that gives best practices of using the program. So we would like to develop a programme where we can assess how it is being taught and develop a structured programme across institutions,” Forde said.
