At Happy Books we love the culture of small business – passionate people with big ideas like us



My name’s Julie and my love of number crunching began as a child.
My mum would bring home big, bulky ledgers from her office along with one of those huge, old adding machines. Fascinated, I would watch her use the machine, fingers darting across the keys as she entered the numbers, before neatly tallying the calculations in the ledger books. I would beg her to show me how to use the machine, and, by the age of 12, I was gleefully doing the work for her! I was hooked.
My love affair with numbers naturally turned into a career, and for over 30 years I worked in the accounting and bookkeeping industry in the UK, Hong Kong, New Zealand and Australia.
Happy Books started as a fledging service after a local builder nagged me to help him with his books. The calls soon came in thick and fast and, before I knew it, I had the makings of a small business with its own books to take care of. My last child had just started school, so everything was pointing to me taking a leap of faith to fulfill my dream of running my own business.
For me, that dream is about helping businesses across all industry streams and geographical areas in Australia.
– Founder & Director, Julie Forrester