Prior to founding Be Youth, Josephine had extensive experience in the beauty industry, having spent 14 years helping beauty companies grow their businesses. From setting up ad campaigns to opening stores, Josephine had done it all. Realizing that there were gaps in the beauty industry, specifically in regards to the lack of dark spot laser removal services in Hong Kong, Josephine founded Be Youth in 2015.
Originally a team of two individuals, Be Youth focused on providing personalized services. The business became extremely popular and soon developed a dedicated client base of more than 1,000 individuals. As this success and growth continued, Josephine realized that she needed to further develop Be Youth’s accounting infrastructure to keep pace with the business’ rapid growth.
“Originally, we used desktop accounting software to handle all our bookkeeping,” Josephine explained. This was a nightmare in regards to efficiency because Be Youth’s office was the only place where their bookkeeping related tasks could be handled. The rigidity of this set-up and the inefficiencies related to inputting data manually meant that Josephine was “spending 1-2 days a week just handling the accounting.” After being recommended to Xero by a close friend, Josephine approached FastLane for assistance in adopting and transitioning to this new cloud-based accounting system.
When asked what made her want to adopt Xero, Josephine responded that, “we needed flexibility and efficiency. It didn’t make sense to spend so long handling accounting after I learnt that Xero could automate all our work in 2 hours.” But most importantly, it was the flexibility that Xero offered that appealed to her. “In the past I could only do our accounting work at the office, but now I can work on it everywhere.”