Guest speaker highlights:  Jacqueline Walker, accountant 

Guest blog post by Kayla W

Jacqueline Walker is an accountant who kindly visited our accounting class this semester to share her knowledge, widsom and real-world experience.  She graduated from Lehman College in 1991 with a Bachelor’s degree in accounting. She chose to go into accounting because she was good at problem solving and it was something that interested her. This was also an opportunity for her since she was looking for a flexible job that would allow her to work from home.

To start, Jacquie Walker worked for other companies. She had temporary jobs doing book-keeping and working for non-profit companies. Soon, she was able to start working for herself at home with her kids. She became an independent contractor which allows her to save her employers added costs of salaried employees (Ex: FICA and other taxes).

As with any job, Walker found accounting comes with its own pros and cons. Pros being the ability to make her own work schedule and working at home in her office with no expenses. The only con to this is that it can be lonely since she is working alone.
    

Walker states that there are also necessary skills to be an entrepreneur and/or an accountant…

• Ability to read financial statements
• Understand costs and taxes
• Problem solving
• math skills
• ability to “sell yourself” which makes people skills essential because it shows you can work well with others and it helps you find clients 

With J Walker & Associates, Walker uses QuickBooks to help her keep track of her client’s expenses, revenue, profit, debits, and credits. She explains that QuickBooks was created for the ‘lay’ person that doesn’t understand accounting and just wants to track revenue and expenses. As QuickBooks can seem very confusing to many, there is an online version that is more costly but much easier to follow.

We appreciated her time and visit!