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Accounting For Good farewells Castlereagh Street
After a decade working from our lovely Castlereagh Street office, the time has come for Accounting For Good to move to a vibrant new location.
The last two years have seen a significant shift in our work-life habits and the processes and tech-stack that we’ve built over the years.
Accounting For Good’s CEO, Kirsten Forrester, discusses our farewell to Castlereagh Street and what you can expect from our schmick new WeWork digs.
A growing business
Accounting For Good moved into its very first office back in 2005. We started with one simple suite on Mountain Street Broadway. As we grew, we took a second office, then a third and eventually we worked out of four separate offices on the same floor. But Kirsten knew we needed a more efficient working environment. She explains:
“As a growing company, it became pretty obvious that we needed something bigger. We decided to move out of Broadway and we started looking for a place where we could have all the team in one large room.
Our preference was the south end of the CBD… it has great accessibility to public transport and also to many of our clients. When we found the Castlereagh Street office, it was a completely blank floor… it didn’t even have any carpet. There was no kitchen or any meeting rooms… it was a totally empty space.
We decided it would make a good home for us, so we built some offices for meeting rooms and completed the fit out… which is still in fantastic condition. There we’ve been ever since!
When we moved, in we fitted out the space for 31 desks. This was when we were Matrix on Board, so we had a broader remit, including financial literacy programs, management consulting as well as our accounting service. Since then, we’ve changed the shape of the organisation so that we could focus on the areas where we work best.
The upshot to that was that we’ve been at Castlereagh Street for 10 years now, with a few not for profit friends having sub-let some of the office space to help fill it when it became too big for our evolved business structure.”
Working during the pandemic
Like many businesses, the global pandemic meant we had to shift to a working from home model. And even as we emerge from stay at home orders, it is unlikely that our team will return to full time in the office. Kirsten continues:
“We’ve always had a flexible working policy, but most of us didn’t choose to use it very often. The pandemic has shown that we can do our work from anywhere… we have all the tools set up. Our team’s dedication to their clients and achieving their deadlines means that everything has just kept on keeping on… even though we haven’t been able to be in the office.
We will absolutely continue with the flexible arrangement and it’s actually great timing because we have reached the end of the Castlereagh Street lease. We’ve realised we don’t need to have a large space to accommodate everyone every day of the week.”
Welcome to WeWork
The move gave us the opportunity to reduce our administrative burden. Maintaining a large office comes with a boring amount of admin work and here at Accounting For Good we don’t have a role dedicated to administration. Our back office is very lean, so that made a shared services space an attractive solution. Kirsten says:
“It’s fantastic that we don’t have to set up our own internet service or electricity provider… we don’t need to hire cleaners or book a recycling service… or even buy milk… all these types of utilities are provided in our new space.
We also wanted to find a location in the same end of town… we didn’t want to move far and if you walk out of 241 Castlereagh Street you can see our new building!
I also wanted a nice space with great amenities for the staff…. There are a lot of things we wouldn’t be able to provide for our team as a small employer… but because we become part of something bigger in a shared space, we can have a really modern working environment. We can even bring our dogs – maybe one at a time – it’s the added value for our staff that made it very attractive.
We have a desk for everyone but they will be used in a hot-desk manner… I want to make it as easy as possible for people to come to work. We’ll have the desks set up so the team can just plug in and get to work. It’s about making sure it’s convenient!
The team can choose to come in based on their workflow. We know that some clients have an early deadline in the day… transactions that need to be finished by lunch time, for example. It often suits the team supporting those clients to work from home because they don’t have to travel and have interruption to their workflow. They can choose their time in the office and at home to match and suit their clients’ needs.
We are looking forward to welcoming our clients to visit. When you arrive you check-in at a kiosk terminal and let them know who you’ve come to visit. The WeWork Community Team will call us while you sit in the comfy lounge area. We’ll come down to get you… if it’s before 12.30pm we can pick up a coffee from the barista in the foyer. We have access to meeting rooms on any floor within the building… no longer are we limited by only having a couple of meeting rooms.”
We will be at our new home – WeWork 320 Pitt Street from 1 December 2021. If you would like to arrange a face to face meeting, please contact us to book a suitable time.
Read our Not For Profit Accounting articles.
