Okonkwo Rita – Bookkeeper, General Virtual Assistant

My name is Okonkwo Rita, but you can simply call me Rita. I am an undergraduate at the University of Lagos, and I expect to graduate in 2024. I am a very dedicated and smart working girl.

My Journey towards this career path started during the COVID-19 pandemic, we were all forced to stay at home for months. While I was home, I thought that it wouldn’t be nice to keep staying idle for this long, so I decided to pick a digital skill to learn that would enable work from home.

In the beginning, it was really hard for me to understand what I was doing, I applied for financial aid on Coursera which enabled me to take the courses for free. I also paid for affordable classes that gave me more insight into being a remote worker and a Virtual assistant.

Going forward, I developed my administrative, data entry, bookkeeping, and customer service skills by volunteering to work for organisations for free. In this role I was responsible for different tasks, which I actually enjoyed doing, I love multitasking and learning new things.

I worked on Excel, created and sent invoices to customers, worked with Google Word, responded to clients via email, inputted data into the database, charged customers where necessary, scheduled and booked appointments for my clients, and also did a little bit of Marketing, which made me have an idea of how to increase and improve sales.

When the pandemic was over, I thought I wouldn’t be able to juggle school and work. It got me worried, but I decided to give it a try in my first semester (fortunately I did well both at work and in my academics).

I got back to school and I volunteered to work with a financial organisation as a General Virtual Assistant. I submitted my portfolio and my resume and fortunately, I got selected to work for free. I was really excited because I saw another opportunity to sharpen my digital skills and learn new things.

This new role allowed me to develop my Bookkeeping and recording skills, through daily recording of the money that comes in and out of the organisation, I was also exposed to software that made Bookkeeping much more interesting, softwares like QuickBooks, Xero, and Zoho Books. However my client preferred QuickBooks, I did bank reconciliation periodically as requested by my client, recorded accounts receivables and payables, prepared balance sheets and trial balances, and sent out invoices to customers where needed. I also did some data entry tasks with Excel spreadsheets and worked with CRM tools like Calendly, Zendesk, Airtable, and intakeQ.

Basically, I will say my path as a General Virtual Assistant/Bookkeeper has been really dynamic and very interesting because I keep on learning and unlearning, there is room for growth and development. Each experience gotten so far has contributed massively to my personal growth and helped in the enrichment of my skills. I can proudly say I can take up any task as a virtual assistant, help you manage your schedule, respond to emails, conduct research, and perform various administrative and light Bookkeeping tasks efficiently and with dedication.

For a copy of Okonkwo Rita’s resume please click here.