32 | Acquisition International, Influential Businesswoman Awards 2024 Jun24179 Business Support Services CEO of the Year 2024 (New York): Jacqueline Edwards Business Pipeline, Inc. acqueline Edwards is uniquely equipped to help her clients manage and grow their businesses, having offered such a service far before the industry coined the term ‘business advisory.’ Wellversed in internal and external factors dictating a company’s growth, Jacqueline carefully assesses a client’s daily operations before injecting the right strategy and support, empowering them to take advantage of opportunities and shielding them from risk. As a result, Jacqueline is a trusted bookkeeping and business development partner. Since 1992, her business and financial management company, Business Pipeline, has been providing exceptional support service, advising business owners and entrepreneurs on how to use cutting-edge technology to stay competitive. As a talented consultancy, she provides attainable strategic advice to improve a business’s overall performance and efficiency. This includes increasing profits, enhancing efficiency, and ultimately building a stronger, more appealing brand. Such accomplishment has placed Business Pipeline to be awarded the Top 50 Accounting Service Practices from Woodard this year. Jacqueline works closely with her peers through her company, sharing her game-changing industry knowledge to ensure the sector has enough accountants and bookkeepers to keep up with demand. She also collaborates closely with small—and medium-sized businesses across the profit and non-profit landscape, stressing the importance of cash flow management when it comes to growing a company. Jacqueline explains, “The industries I have the most fun with are service businesses like social service companies, real estate, construction, and high-wealth families and individuals.” Regardless of the industry, Jacqueline firmly believes that business owners need to hire professional accountants and bookkeepers instead of just somebody who can figure out how to use a particular software. We may be living in the age of technology, but these systems still need someone skilled in the basics to help a business perform more efficiently and achieve its goals, both in the short and long term. For Jacqueline, “technology does not remove the necessity to know accounting principles or basic math,” which many businesses overlook. Operating in the corporate finance environment brings about other challenges, too, primarily regarding customers’ unwillingness to change the technology they use in their tech stacking process, which is essentially the pairing of software that runs a business. Jacqueline says, “Many business owners and their teams find it hard to let go and adopt new tech to aid them on their path to success.” Pivoting from one platform to another is not always easy, but with Jacqueline’s guidance, clients can achieve the clarity they need to succeed. An example is a recent client Jacqueline worked with, a commercial building owner who owed a huge tax bill to the city. The client was disputing the amount they owed, but it was difficult to prove their innocence due to their accounting platform choice and incomplete data. Jacqueline placed the business on QuickBooks Online, managing this $40 million asset. Carrying out seven years of cleanup and back work, Jacqueline eventually proved the client owed $4 million less than was initially demanded and uncovered significant fraud amongst three employees. In a landscape where technology such as AI is becoming increasingly integrated, Jacqueline reinforces to business owners and their teams that AI will not replace humans. Instead, as Jacqueline herself puts it, “Tech cannot do it all without humans, and as time moves on, humans cannot do it without tech. It’s a partnership where we must find the best way to work together for the best outcome. As humans, we are unique in so many ways, and that is something tech cannot replace, as long as we challenge ourselves to think differently.” To further nurture this idea, the rest of 2024 is set to see Jacqueline add an educational platform to Business Pipeline, Inc., helping people to become skilled in the fundamentals of accountancy to drive success, mainly focusing on the neurodiversity community. For this reason and many more, we recognize creative problem solver Jacqueline Edwards as the Business Support Services CEO of the Year 2024 (New York). Contact: Jacqueline Edwards Company: Business Pipeline, Inc. Web Address: https://businesspipeline.com/ From her home base in New York City, where she has owned and operated the business and financial management firm Business Pipeline, Inc. for more than three decades, Jacqueline Edwards stands as a beacon of trust in the field of business support services. Jacqueline is a highly skilled business manager and certified QuickBooks Advance ProAdvisor in the top 100 for the last two years out of 1.4 million advisors. The skills she leverages allow her to offer several services, including bookkeeping, business consulting, and training, to name just a few. We catch up with Jacqueline to find out more. J Bookkeeping, Business Consulting & Marketing
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