To achieve her qualification goal, Nicola completed the following course choice:
The ICB Career Path

Sometime, the journey to bookkeeping can be a torturous path, or take turns the student never expected. For Nicola Hutchings from Bexleyheath, in South East London, it’s been a long road, but one that she has walked determinedly all the way to the opening of her own practice.

Nicola started off in the world of banking and spent many years working for financial institutions as diverse as a small-scale Asian bank, where she worked in internal audit, then onto Bank of England reporting, and then all the way to becoming deputy manager with a Norwegian bank.

But, on maternity leave after the birth of her first child, she wanted to work from home and balance childcare with studying from home. After a discussion with her husband, she realised that bookkeeping suited her background in banking and would allow her to balance both her work and home life.  Even then, the road to Ideal Schools wasn’t smooth.

She said: “I tried out a lot of different colleges, even having some come to my house. But they all had a high-pressure sales approach, and I found it very disheartening. Then someone recommended Ideal Schools, and I was sold from the first contact.

 “They had a really attractive study programme, which was reasonably-priced and a sensible, well-thought out career path I could see myself following. I really felt they were a great team, always available and the Facebook page was a big help. When I was working from home, it was brilliant to feel part of a network”.

Nicola took the plunge, and studied to achieve her Membership of the Institute of Certified Bookkeepers (MICB). She has now obtained her practice licence, and is opening her business, NAH Bookkeeping.

She said: “After my second child was born, and I had a few other family issues, my studies had to be re-prioritised, but the team at Ideal Schools was incredibly understanding. They knew what it was like when life gets in the way of studies, and I never felt pressured to move at anything other than my own speed.   

“I want my business to have the same sort of approachability, and the same friendliness. I know that running a business can become a handful, and I want NAH Bookkeeping to take some of the strain, and let small business owners concentrate on making their businesses the best they can be.” She’s currently in the final stages of the Payroll course and is already thinking about the future and the possibility of increasing her skill set by studying the Ideal Schools Self-Assessment course. This will enable her to offer her clients a more complete package to fulfill all their bookkeeping requirements!