A capable chaos creature, and the business behind her.
Most small-business owners didn't set out to become part-time bookkeepers, filing clerks, and admin assistants on top of the actual work they love. But the paperwork piles on anyway — the receipts, the invoices, the HST deadlines, the inbox nobody has time to sort. Sooner or later, something has to give, and usually it's an evening or a weekend that should've been yours.
The Office Goblin started as an answer to that exact problem: a reliable, detail-obsessed helper who takes the recurring admin and bookkeeping off a business owner's plate entirely, so they can go back to running the business instead of babysitting the paperwork.
The name — and the goblin herself — comes from a simple idea: business admin doesn't have to feel like a chore you dread. It can feel like something quietly, capably handled in the background, by someone who genuinely likes sorting chaos into order. Somewhere between a woodland creature and your most organized coworker.
The work is built on a background in executive administration and business accounting, with hands-on experience preparing personal and sole-proprietor taxes. That combination — admin systems plus the numbers side — is what makes it possible to handle both the books and the everything-else around them, instead of just one piece of the puzzle.
Every client relationship runs on the same principle: plain language, no jargon, and total honesty about what's in scope and what belongs with an accountant or lawyer instead. Knowing that line — and telling you plainly when something's crossed it — is part of the job.
"Bookkeeper" never quite fit. It sounds like someone who enters numbers into boxes. That's not really the job.
If you ask me something I don't know, I'll say so — and then I'll go move the earth to actually find the answer, rather than guess and hope. I read the fine print other people skip. I look for the loopholes, the programs, the small print that's actually there to help you, if someone bothers to look.
I also quit a stable job and went on EI to build this. Almost nobody does that — it's a genuinely uncomfortable, risky thing to do. I mention it because it's part of why I get it: betting on your own thing, without a safety net, while everyone around you is doing the sensible corporate path instead. That's not a strategy I'd recommend blindly, but it's the reason I don't talk down to anyone taking a real risk on their own craft, art, or idea.
A traditional bookkeeper specializes in things most small and micro businesses barely touch — depreciation schedules, asset registers, liabilities. That makes real sense for a business with a warehouse, a fleet, big equipment. It makes a lot less sense for someone selling candles, stickers, or soap out of their kitchen, where there usually isn't a huge asset or a big up-front investment to track in the first place.
What you actually need at that size isn't asset tracking. It's help balancing the day-to-day — so the money coming in doesn't just quietly disappear before it's done anything for you. That's the actual job. Not depreciation schedules. Making sure you don't blow it all and end up with nothing.
