Connect Series: Meet Finance Assistant Chloe Do!

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Chloe was born in Vietnam and moved to Canada nine years ago to start her education and career in accounting. As a math teacher and business owner Chloe’s mother used to teach her lots of things about math and business finance when she was a kid. Her mother has been the biggest influence in her career choice.

Chloe has a passion for helping business owners and individuals to manage and grow their financial well‑being. She has great attention to detail and enjoys working with numbers and analyzing financial statements. After graduating from Simon Fraser University Chloe had a few years of experience as an accounting clerk. Her main duties were recording, processing and checking all financial transactions to ensure accuracy and transparency.

Chloe is not only passionate about the field she graduated from but also inclined towards creative activities. In her free time she enjoys singing, playing guitar and learning piano from her boyfriend. She also enjoys learning different languages and cooking on weekends.

We see you have a great passion for what you do in the financial world. What has been your biggest win in your career thus far?

So far my greatest achievement was when I was a treasurer for the Vietnamese Student Association at my college. I led my team in hosting a funding event where we sold Vietnamese sandwiches and coffee to students and staff on campus. We made a profit of $350 from selling and used this fund to host a traditional Lunar New Year event for our club members. I learned a lot from that funding event about how business theory applies to the real financial world, how to keep the product cost as low as possible and also how difficult it was to persuade the customers without being annoying.

Many people dislike looking into their finances and try to avoid it until they absolutely have to! What advice can you give to people preparing for the upcoming tax season?

A lot of things have changed recently due to the pandemic, including taxes. Here are some tips that I can share to prepare for the upcoming tax season:

  1. Make sure you report CERB or CRB payments when you file your personal income tax return.
  2. Look into the simplified home office expenses deduction. As many of us worked remotely in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the government has made it easier to claim a deduction for home office expenses this year. If you were working from home for more than 50 percent of your usual work hours over at least four consecutive weeks in 2020, you can deduct $2 from your taxable income for every day you worked at home due to the pandemic (up to a maximum of $400). This new method is called the temporary flat rate method.
  3. Make tax-efficient deduction decisions. If you expect to have a significantly higher income in the coming years, you can defer taking the tax deduction this year. You can make an RRSP contribution now and not claim the deduction until you are in a higher tax bracket. For example, a $10,000 contribution deducted at a 29 percent rate will generate $2,900 in tax savings. A $10,000 contribution deducted at a 45 percent tax rate will generate $4,500 in tax savings. You’ll still benefit from the tax deferral for any income generated by investments in your RRSP in the meantime, even if you have not taken the deduction.

Finance isn’t your whole life, and we see that you have many other hobbies, such as playing instruments, singing and other creative outlets. Have these hobbies played a part in navigating you through this pandemic? If so, how?

Picking up hobbies is the key to managing mental health. Back in March when I was staying at home all day long, I watched some videos of people around the world making music during their lockdown — from Italians singing “Bella Ciao” from their apartment balconies to policemen in Spain playing guitar while on patrol. I found music to be a cheap and effective way to distract myself and a buffer against stress. Then I started to think of some hobbies that I could do at home and decided to learn to play the piano. Sometimes my boyfriend, my housemate and I play guitar and sing our favourite song — “Lemon Tree” by the Beatles — together on Friday nights. I also tried several singing apps on my phone, such as Smule and WeSing, to sing with my friends online. This has maintained our connection and reduced loneliness during the quarantine. I’ve realized staying at home is not that bad. Staying at home not only protects us and other people from the virus but also enhances our social bonding and gives us a chance to learn some new skills. Music, like so many art forms, can help us process our emotions and feel like we are not alone. The virus might be keeping people apart, but music can help bring them together.

At Reportex our core values of team, mentorship, equality, community and industry are central to what we do. Which of these values resonates most strongly with you and why?

“Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.” — Henry Ford

Team resonates with me most strongly because I believe teamwork and collaboration can help solve difficult problems and improve the organization’s success rate. I love working in teams where team members are willing to contribute different perspectives and support each other. No one is perfect and can do all the work alone. Our teammates will help us recognize our strengths and weaknesses. They can also give us constructive feedback when we make mistakes because to me it is not about what mistake we made, but it is about what we learn from it and how we fix it so we are not repeating the same mistake in the future. Having a good relationship with our teammates can make us feel happy and productive at work. Each of us can spend around 40 hours a week and about 80 percent of our lives working. It is important that we spend most of our lives around people who we can connect with and be happy to work with.

We have been talking a bit about wellness on the blog and through our Slack channels. Do you have a favourite way to recharge or any tips for staying well?

Getting myself a manicure or pedicure is a great way to boost my mood and brighten my day. Years ago I worked in a nail spa, and I loved it. It was so fun to see new clients each day and watch them enjoy doing something nice for themselves. A lot of people would go to the salon to get a mani-pedi, but you can easily get a mini mani-pedi kit from Shoppers Drug Mart and do it at home. Spending a little time and paying a little attention can make you feel like you’re getting a mani-pedi in a spa. Here’s a tip for making nail polish dry faster: after you finish painting your nails, wait about two minutes and then dip your nails in cold water for about four minutes. After you remove your nails from the water, you should see water beading on top of the nail surface — this means your polish is completely dry.

The (R)evolution is Here – the A – Z in FAQs

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By Megan Ejack, Director of Marketing & Communications

We’ve entered a new age.

As the world continues to change and evolve, so do we. With everything going on around us, there is a glimmer of light at the end of this long, dark 2020 tunnel, and with that comes a shift in perspective. We have been offered a remarkable opportunity to redesign our lives, not only in how we work but also in how we continue to connect. What was born out of necessity has shifted, giving us a new vision of how we could thrive in our day to day — even in court. This is a chance to really evaluate the virtual and hybrid tools that have become so readily available to us and consider how to continue to integrate them as we move forward.

There is possibility everywhere. But where to begin?

We recently introduced you to the Reportex (R)evolution — a new perspective on connection through technology. When you join us in the (R)evolution, you will find yourself opening up to these new ways of working, with access to personalized tech support to enhance your evolving practice. You will be able to choose to continue to conduct virtual or hybrid proceedings, to enhance your in-person options with new tools and to learn to use practical solutions that will help you to appear in the office or in court safely and remotely.

Whether you want to continue to work fully remotely or you miss that in-person connection, the Reportex team will help facilitate a solution for you through our flexible and supportive options. We will be highlighting each of our e-services over the coming weeks and months, with continued updates on new developments as they arise.

Reportex has always been a tech-forward company on the forefront of innovation, but our goal is to ensure that the way we adopt tech doesn’t leave our clients in the dust. No matter your comfort level with technology, Reportex can get you up and running on your schedule.

When we first said that we are in this together, we meant it. Now as our legal community moves boldly into this new era, our team is committed to providing you with the information and tools to successfully navigate the terrain and remain effective and connected along the way.

Click on the above image to read our FAQs

The Reportex (R)evolution

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By Megan Ejack, Director of Marketing & Communications

Welcome to 2021

A new landscape of legal tech is before us, bridging virtual services and hybrid options with simple, accessible solutions for your litigation practice at discovery, trial and appeal.

We invite you to join the Reportex tech revolution — tech that truly connects.

Evolution Revolution

Much can be said about the industrial revolutions, about their unique impacts on society and their progressive (though sometimes problematic) natures as they pertain to the human condition. But one truth remains — through simple shifts in means and perspective, often profound in their relative simplicity, these movements altered the very fabric and future of civilization.

Since the dawn of time our world has gone through an endless series of evolutions, and as we look at what has come out of this incredible past year, it is clear we are smack in the middle of another. Was it the most transformative year of all time? Who’s to compare? We are evolving at a different pace and in radically different ways than, say, the hunter-gatherers and farmers of yore or the textile workers and the machinists in the first waves of the mid 1700s.

What is true is that evolution breeds progress and that innovation will always be at the forefront of the human experience. The incredible shift in innovation that we are currently facing is the collective acknowledgement of our deep need to connect.

As we evolve, we challenge ourselves to take great leaps forward in thought, perspective and action. Evolution is an opportunity to rethink the way we do things and to evaluate the potential for new and better circumstances for our world. We find ourselves in such a place now, not necessarily with machinery or technology per se, but with how we approach the tools and systems we already have in place.


Evolve Your Practice with Reportex This Year

The First Industrial Revolution brought with it the machinery and tools that allowed a new kind of productivity to emerge. The Second Industrial Revolution developed the means to share that productivity across oceans, to discover and create commerce with new lands and people, to bridge a gap across the world. As information technology began to emerge in the late 1900s, a new landscape began to develop. That third revolution is characterized by an almost mystical digitization and automation inherent to electronic technology.

Progress. Productivity. The birth of the hustle.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution (a.k.a. Industry 4.0) has had us leveraging that technology in new and innovative ways, creating platform-sharing systems and artificial intelligence to aid in the development, production and distribution of products and commodities, goods and services, with a near unlimited potential for continued growth.

Each of the four phases of industrial revolution has marked a major social and economic turning point for civilization, leading to the one we find ourselves in now — or rather where we found ourselves until now.

Reconnect

In 2020 we were faced with an entirely new challenge, seemingly overnight: how to continue to engage in commerce and productivity when the machine had been forced to slow down — and in some cases stop completely. For many it has not been possible to continue, but for some of us there has been an enlightened pivot (word of the year, apparently) that has taken place. As we all faced the challenges of this global event, the only relevant strategy was to regroup, reimagine and move into a different type of growth mindset: connection. Moreover connection through technology.

For Reportex this has meant stepping up our game in all of our e-services. Virtual litigation has become necessary to the justice system, and although we have always been developing leading-edge systems and technology, it has now become the key to our sustained success. Courts are adopting all sorts of new, innovative solutions, and we are at the forefront.

Join the (R)evolution

The new (R)evolution is all about connection. Over the coming months we will be highlighting all of our e-services and offering specialized guidance to help you evolve your practice. Our innovative solutions and hands-on technical team will fuel your work and connect you to the possibility inherent to this changing landscape.

Join us as we help to revolutionize the way you work. #techthatconnects