Student story: entrepreneur Tanja Kiriloff

News 6.11.2018

"My name is Tanja Kiriloff, and I own a one-woman business selling pet food and supplies. My business operations are small-scale and were launched in 2011. At the time, I had five dogs and the amount of food consumed per year was, naturally, considerable. I decided to start a business in order to also save some money on the food for my own dogs.

My business grew somewhat in 2015, and I also became VAT registered. At that point, bookkeeping also became a bit more complicated and I was assisted by a friend who works as an accountant. Still, my business has all along been so small-scale that I do not have a separate shop but store the goods in my home. The operations have expanded through the grapevine since I have not marketed by business at all.

I started my Business Management studies on Laurea’s Hyvinkää campus in January 2017. During the spring, I thought about learning to do my company’s bookkeeping myself completely through an accounting course. I discussed this with Tarja Hartikainen, who instructed the financial administration projects, and we deemed that my company’s bookkeeping could be one of the financial administration projects in the autumn of 2017. I was also one of the project participants. Thus, I spent the autumn of 2017 learning the ropes of bookkeeping. In December, Tarja and I agreed that my company’s bookkeeping for the following year and the 2017 closing of accounts would be one of the projects in financial administration in 2018. The new project team started working on these topics in January.

The cooperation with the project teams has been going well, and I have learned new things myself during the project. For example, the project team in the spring created a new and clearer Excel template in which I enter sales and purchases. Feedback provided by others has helped generate development suggestions and ideas to improve the things I do. I plan to continue to keep my business small. At least right now, I do not think I would ever expand my business operations enough to earn my monthly income from them.

I would like to to work together with Laurea in the future as well and to have a project team take care of my company’s bookkeeping. I think it is only useful for students to have the opportunity to study financial administration by preparing the bookkeeping of several different companies."

Tanja Kiriloff,
entrepreneur