Laurence Ward.
Laurence Ward is the founder of Alpine Accounts, a bookkeeping and business advisory practice in Toogoom, Queensland, about twenty minutes from Hervey Bay on the Fraser Coast. He is a Swinburne University graduate, has spent more than 50 years working on accounts and books for Australian businesses, and has run his own businesses for more than 20 years. He works with clients across the Fraser Coast in person and with businesses anywhere in Australia remotely.
Fifty years is an unusual amount of context
Laurence Ward has been working on the books of Australian businesses for more than fifty years. That covers several recessions, the introduction of GST, the shift from paper ledgers to desktop software to the cloud, and a great many businesses that succeeded or failed for reasons that were visible in their numbers well before anyone acted on them.
The practical value of that is pattern recognition. Most problems a small business runs into are not new. Somebody has been here before, and the question of what usually happens next is often more useful than any single report.
He has run businesses, not just accounted for them
Laurence has spent more than twenty years running his own businesses. That is a different education to accounting for other people. It means having made payroll when it was tight, having priced work wrongly and lived with it, and having had to decide whether to take on debt with incomplete information.
It also means the advice tends to be practical rather than theoretical. A recommendation that is correct but impossible to implement in a business with three staff and no spare hours is not much of a recommendation.
Training and approach
Laurence is a Swinburne University graduate. Alpine Accounts also has in house legal access, which matters more often than people expect, because contract and structure questions sit right at the boundary between commercial and legal and are frequently deferred until they become expensive.
The working style is plain. No jargon, no reports that need a translator, and an honest answer when the answer is that you do not need the thing you were about to buy.
Based on the Fraser Coast, working Australia wide
The practice runs out of Toogoom, a small coastal town about twenty minutes north west of Hervey Bay in Queensland. Fraser Coast clients get the option of meeting in person, which for some businesses is the whole point.
Everything else is cloud based, so clients in other states are on exactly the same footing. Video calls run on Zoom or Google Meet, in AEST.
Common questions
Who will actually do my work?
Laurence. Alpine Accounts is a small practice, which is the point. You are not handed to a junior after the first meeting, and the person who knows your business is the person doing the work.
What does the free consultation involve?
Thirty minutes to understand the business and where the friction is. You leave with a clear next step whether or not you engage Alpine Accounts. There is no charge and no obligation.
Do you take clients outside the Fraser Coast?
Yes. The work is cloud based and clients in other states are on exactly the same footing as local ones. In person meetings are simply an option that Fraser Coast clients also have.