The Annual Excellence Awards have been a highlight on the Association’s event calendar since 2013.

2020 marks the 7th year of these prestigious awards

The Excellence Awards recognise and celebrate the success of bookkeepers and their businesses, and play an important role in raising awareness of our profession within New Zealand. 

It remains vitally important that we celebrate the success of our fellow bookkeepers and provide them with the recognition they deserve. By recognising the achievements of our peers, we are all contributing to not only building the brand of our successful nominees, but also promoting the professionalism of bookkeeping to the public.

Entries are open early each year with winners announced at the Awards and Gala Dinner evening following #Bookkeepcon.   

Why enter the Excellence Awards?

Entering the Excellence Awards presents a unique opportunity to focus on a bookkeeper’s personal or business strengths and the competitive advantage that makes their services exceptional.

Nominees can benefits of entering the Excellence Awards by:

• Celebrating the journey of the bookkeeper or their business to date.
• Highlighting your success to current and potential clients, suppliers and staff.
• Motivating and energising your team to continue building your success.
• Positioning the businesses strategy for long-term sustainable growth.
• Obtaining an independent acknowledgement of the business’s success.
• Benchmarking your business against competitors.
• Allowing a view of your business from a fresh perspective.

In essence, this provides nominees with the ideal opportunity to step back, review their own operation and take the next step forward.

Entry guidelines

The Excellence Awards are open to individual and business members of ICNZB and there is no charge to enter. 

Nominations for most awards may be submitted by the bookkeeper themselves, their employer, or by another person associated with the business, or employee, in a bookkeeping capacity.   There are several exceptions to this rule – most notably the peer nominated Service to Bookkeeping Award.  We recommend you read the criteria thoroughly prior to submitting an entry to ensure the entry is valid. 

All entries will be checked for validity by the organising team before being accepted. 

Entry confidentiality

For the award process to be effective, there must be unquestionable fairness and objectivity for all concerned.

• All awards entry documentation and entry forms are treated as confidential by the organising team and judges.
• The organising team is comprised of employees of the Association, who are impartial.
• Applicants are not expected to provide or reveal, proprietary information regarding products, processes or services.
• Judges will be asked to declare any conflicts of interest and if necessary alternative judging arrangements will be made.
• Each judge has volunteered their time without compensation and is committed to assist with the success of the awards.
• Judging decisions remain confidential to judges and no correspondence will be entered into regarding the outcome of the awards.

The Judging process and panel

Once the entry period has closed, our judges will receive all award submissions and allocate a score of 1-10 for each question based on two key areas:

• The information provided to the questions
• The relevance of the answer to the award category

The individual judges are responsible for determining the score allocation for each question and returning their scoresheet to the organising team.  The scores for each question from each judge are then totalled by the organising team. The final total will determine the winner and this person will be announced at the Awards and Gala Dinner evening on Saturday, 25 July 2020 in Napier.

Meet the 2020 Judging Panel

We are pleased to introduce you to the 2020 panel of judges.  These individuals have graciously donated their time to take part in our Excellence Awards as independent judges. 

Rick Van Dyk, Chief Development Officer, ICB Australia

Rick joined ICB in April 2010 and has since held a variety of roles and been instrumental in the developing journey of ICB. Rick has primary responsibility for managing the strategic Partnerships of ICB and was our primary point of contact for the merger of the New Zealand Bookkeepers Association Incorporated with ICB.  Rick is also responsible for Development Initiatives for ICB globally and represented the ICB community of Bookkeepers in the 2017 Education review, leading the call for change to a contemporary Cert IV that meets the professional needs of today's bookkeeper. 

Felicity Brown, Head of Employee Services, MYOB

As Head of Employee Services at MYOB Felicity Brown leads a trans-Tasman operational support team from the company’s Auckland office. Felicity takes a holistic approach to employee experience with her current role spanning both traditional people-orientated functions and internal digital services.

During Felicity’s four years with MYOB, the business management software company has experienced large-scale transformational change as it has evolved from a desktop world into an agile online company providing real-time cloud services. Felicity was part of the team which ensured a smooth transition and played an important role in the exponential rise of MYOB’s employee engagement scores, staff retention rates and attracting top talent to the business. She has overseen purposeful changes to recruitment strategies, specifically the introduction of MYOB’s first graduate recruitment programme which led to the creation of MYOB’s Future Maker’s Academy – a program designed specifically to accelerate the growth of young software developers through ongoing mentorship. She has also been a big proponent of and advocate for the company’s market-leading ‘Flexperience’ policy to ensure MYOB’s employees enjoy a work-life balance that benefits both the individual and the team.

Prior to MYOB Felicity spent over a decade in various senior roles within the human resources team at KPMG Auckland, working across the full spectrum of ‘people and culture’. She is passionate about challenging traditional business contexts and delivering innovative solutions to transform the employee experience, creating healthy, thriving workplaces.

Natalie Screen, General Manager - Customer Success, Xero

Natalie is the General Manager - Customer Success at Xero, leading the award-winning global Customer Success team, who can be found all around the world from NZ, Australia, the UK and the US. Her teams present knowledge, enable community collaboration, and provide digital support to the exponentially growing customer base, which currently sits at over 2 million subscribers.

Natalie has created a continuous improvement culture, leveraging best of breed solutions, such as Salesforce Service Cloud and Community Cloud and AI, to find more effective ways to manage the explosion in customer demand, while significantly improving customer happiness and advocacy. Being customer led has enabled Natalie to drive innovation at scale, allowing Xero to expand their customer lens into building valuable education and proactive success experiences, ultimately moving from a support model to a success model.

Enter the 2020 Awards

The ICNZB Excellence Awards are open for entries on 2 March 2020

Acknowledging our previous winners

Congratulations to our previous years award winners on their success.