Motivation | Career changer
Risk and reward
Alexis Charkiw MAAT started her career at Barclays in Bristol before taking her AAT qualifications, gaining experience in practice and then setting up her own firm, Right Click Accounting. She explains how building relationships with clients and looking at businesses from the perspective of a lender have helped her create a unique service
Words Marianne Curphey
AT A GLANCE
1
Range of choices
An AAT qualification gives you many opportunities for different career paths
2
Enabling growth
Helping clients assemble good-quality data is important for their future business success
3
Human touch
AI can help with automated tasks but can never replace the human element
Alexis Charkiw is far from being a traditional accountant. With a background in corporate banking and risk management, and experience of running her own businesses, she has a very different approach to helping clients grow their companies. What’s more, she is a “people person” who loves connecting with other AAT members, communicating with clients and building an accountancy business that puts people first.
“I’ve also enjoyed working and studying,” she explains, “and I’m always keen to drive myself forward.” After studying English, business studies and sociology at A-Level, Charkiw followed her father’s guidance and enrolled at the University of South Wales (Glamorgan) to study law and criminology. She thought she would love the structure and intellectual challenge of the subject but she found it “really dry”. Her strong values and sense of right and wrong meant that she was also having doubts about representing defendants whom she suspected were guilty.
While she was at university, Charkiw fell down a flight of stairs at a friend’s 21st birthday party. She came home to recover and felt uncharacteristically unmotivated and depressed about continuing her studies. Then a chance conversation with a family friend’s mum who worked at Barclays led to a full-time role in banking.
“I was a cashier first and then I worked my way up,” she explains. “I ended up in corporate banking. I was working in Cardiff and Bristol, learning about funding, security, financial covenants and banking risk. It was an amazing experience which taught me all about risk management from the lender’s perspective.”
That experience and knowledge is something that she now shares with her own clients, impressing upon them the need to collate and provide good data, even when they are not immediately planning to apply for funding or a loan.
Opening the door to new opportunities
While she was working at Barclays, Charkiw decided to begin working towards her AAT qualifications. Although she was progressing well at the bank, she felt that achieving AAT Level 4 would mean that she had a variety of potential career options should she ever decide to move on.
“I really did want some sort of qualification, so I did my AAT study in the evenings over three and a half years,” she says. “Barclays helped pay for it but the initiative came from me. I had researched financial qualifications and I liked the fact that AAT is recognised worldwide, and that I could keep my options open. I was so determined to have a qualification that I had earned and that belonged to me.”
She studied with Kaplan in Cardiff, attending evening classes after work, and qualified in 2012.
“I had researched financial qualifications and I liked the fact that AAT is recognised worldwide, and that I could keep my options open.”
Helping businesses understand risk and data
Charkiw’s banking experience at Barclays was pivotal in terms of her professional development and the advice that she would later give her accountancy clients.
“I was able to see the financials from the lender’s side, what they look for, the risk analysis involved in lending,” she says. “As a corporate credit analyst we’d be looking at the strength of somebody’s financial data. If they didn’t have the right records quickly, it already flew up a red flag.”
After giving birth to twins, Charkiw realised that the cost of childcare meant she could not afford to go back to work at the bank, so she took voluntary redundancy and began to rethink her career path. She missed the camaraderie of the bank and the intellectual challenge of data, and while at home looking after her babies she began a product business, laying the groundwork for her next venture.
“I was running my business and doing my own accounts,” she recalls. “Then the night before my wedding in Croatia, I was reconciling my own accounts in Xero on the bed. My husband-to-be commented that if I loved accounts that much maybe I should think about doing it as a full-time job.”
To begin with, Charkiw became a freelance bookkeeper. After gaining her AAT licence, her practice now serves everyone from sole traders to limited companies. “We’re very digital,” she says. “We’ll take on those ‘paper bag’ clients, but they have to be willing to change their habits.” Her brother, an ACCA accountant, works alongside her.
Charkiw understands clients because she is a business owner – and because she also knows what banks are looking for. While she feels AI can help automate repetitive tasks, it is never going to replace the human touch.
“There’s no way a piece of AI is able to explain things in the same way as a friendly chat with a client,” she says. “Business owners need support because there is no HMRC office they can go to for help and advice.” She’s now secretary of the AAT South Wales branch and deeply involved in the profession’s evolution.
Advice for AAT students
Charkiw says she uses her AAT technical skills and her professional ethics every day in her work. She now has a business that is growing, one that she is proud of and one where she can help clients on a deeper level because of her wealth of background knowledge.
“Just keep going with your studies,” she advises. “Don’t compare yourself, just focus on what is important and never compare your chapter one to someone else’s chapter 100.”
She says the best part of owning her own business is the relationships she builds with clients and the freedom and flexibility it offers.
“There is no glass ceiling,” she says. “My twins’ birthday was on Tuesday and I didn’t have to ask anyone else for approval for time off to spend with them.”
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