Plugging In: Navigating Numbers

ALISHA THOMAS, owner of Wait. What? Consulting, never saw herself in a role outside of working in a creative field. In fact, all throughout her childhood and into early adulthood, most of her time was spent on art, design, and fashion.

In the present day, she’s still passionate about the arts, that’s part of her that’ll never change. One thing she didn’t see coming, however, was her career pivot to accounting.

“All I ever did was art stuff growing up, and in high school and college,” Thomas says. “Then I worked in the costume department at UNCW right out of college. So, I’ve only had creative jobs.”

Thomas was first introduced to accounting when she helped a friend with his new business, Freaker USA. The business is a one-size-fits-all beverage insulator featured at one point on Shark Tank. In the beginning, Thomas just packed orders, then eventually went on to handle some of the company’s accounting and bookkeeping for about six or seven years.

“I literally was like, ‘We have all these bills that need to be paid, and we have checks that need to go in the bank,’” Thomas recalls. “Is there some sort of system for this? Oh yeah, it’s called accounting and bookkeeping! I just had no idea, but I said, ‘Oh, I’ll figure it out.’ And I did figure it out.”

Thomas used QuickBooks for all of her accounting and business needs for Freaker USA.

“I learned a bunch of business stuff that I just never thought I would ever learn because it just wasn’t my background,” Thomas says. “I did it for years and years and years, and then I got really burnt out.”

Thomas eventually sold her shares and left Freaker USA in 2017 with the mindset that she’d never return to accounting again. That was until she had a friend who needed help with QuickBooks.

“I had a friend who was like, ‘Hey, can you help my friend with QuickBooks,’” Thomas recalls. “I was like, ‘Oh sure, I can help a one-person business doing QuickBooks, sure.’”

Soon more and more people were asking Thomas for help with QuickBooks, which eventually led to an opportunity to make a career out of it in 2019. That business is now formally known as Wait. What? Consulting, and is based out of Wilmington. It focuses on other creatives, just like Thomas, who have their own company but need a little extra help in the business department.

Currently, Thomas has two employees and does bookkeeping for clients, as well as 1:1 QuickBooks coaching to help people learn the program or how to just get started in general.

After helping hundreds of people and teaching them QuickBooks, Thomas started to feel repetitive in the help she was giving, which eventually led to her starting an online course titled Artistic Accounting: A QuickBooks Course.

“It’s specifically designed for creatives who don’t want to learn QuickBooks, who have an aversion to numbers,” Thomas says. “And it walks you through how to use QuickBooks but also basic accounting concepts and things like that. I launched it three weeks ago and so far, so good.”

In addition to learning all you need to know about QuickBooks, Artistic Accounting goes over the language of bookkeeping “so that you can run your business with confidence.” It also goes over what Thomas calls “clarity in your numbers,” which helps users “wave goodbye to financial fog so that you can actually know your number.” And to top it all off, Thomas discusses how to profit and not panic, which is essentially “learning the strategies that keep your creativity profitable, not just possible.”

The $199 course is evergreen, meaning it can be completed at a user’s own pace online. Additionally, Artistic Accounting is made up of 31 lessons packed into one-and-a-half hours of video content. In the future, Thomas plans to add more advanced aspects to her course, including how to troubleshoot QuickBooks.

“QuickBooks is the thing that nobody wants to do it, and they wanna find a different way,” Thomas says. “You’ve just gotta get QuickBooks, and you learn to do it. And once you start doing it, you realize it’s not that hard; it’s just like any other app or software. If you own a small business, you’ve gotta keep your bookkeeping stuff together. I’m hoping this will help people take that leap.”

To view more of photographer and stylists Drewe & Kate’s work, go to dreweandkate.com

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