Powering Malaysia’s gig economy to support local businesses

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On-demand job app GoGet has constructed a group of gig staff who’re important to businesses huge and small

FRANCESCA Chia has quick earned a reputation for herself as an entrepreneur with coronary heart and imaginative and prescient. Chosen as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader in 2021, she co-founded digital platform GoGet, which has been steadily empowering the gig economy and creating new job alternatives in Malaysia, with a wider imaginative and prescient to increase throughout South-East Asia.

In true Malaysian style, the 34-year-old former administration marketing consultant from KL shares that it was a love for meals that first kickstarted the concept for establishing GoGet again in 2014.

“A group of us were sitting together talking about the pervasiveness of mobile technology. Smartphones were getting progressively more affordable and had found their way into everyone’s hands.

“We thought that with this new technology, we could communicate with just about anyone in the city. Say if we needed help picking up our favourite nasi lemak but we were really busy at work, we could just ask someone in the vicinity to do it for us,” she says.

They quickly realised that they didn’t have to restrict themselves to simply meals.

“We could expand to just about anything. By connecting the city on an open platform, people could request anything from rides to getting errands done. All of this could be crowdsourced with a simple mobile app in your pocket. We felt this would be a great way to build up the community as well as create jobs,” Chia says.

‘By connecting the city on an open platform, people could request anything from rides to getting errands done. All of this could be crowdsourced with a simple mobile app in your pocket,’ says Francesca Chia, CEO of GoGet.‘By connecting the city on an open platform, people could request anything from rides to getting errands done. All of this could be crowdsourced with a simple mobile app in your pocket,’ says Francesca Chia, CEO of GoGet.

Today, Chia is CEO of GoGet, which is recognised as a number one and trusted group platform for dependable and expert part-time assist and permits businesses to scale rapidly with out incurring full-time operational prices.

GoGet can be the winner of the UN Capital Development Fund’s Accelerator Programme as a result of it promotes monetary inclusion by way of its ecosystem, which ensures customers within the gig economy are protected and revel in comparable advantages to full time staff.

Indeed, over the last couple of adverse pandemic years when employers have been compelled to minimize prices and staff have been left jobless, GoGet supplied a well timed answer for a lot of.

“The pandemic really posed a lot of challenges. One of the critical ones for us was how to scale our technology because we were one of the few relevant industry players that were able to operate during the lockdown,” Chia says.

“Our service helped businesses and individuals run errands even when they were stuck at home. We were able to help a lot of Malaysians – from shopping to delivering food – during the lockdown.”

Creating these alternatives for gig work additionally instantly benefited the B40 phase, enabling them to safe a versatile earnings throughout these turbulent instances. GoGet additionally has a long-standing partnership with MDEC and is dedicated to coaching and offering incentives to energetic GoGetters. So, it is no marvel then that there are over 13,500 GoGetters!

“We have mostly part-timers,” Chia shares. “They all share the same kind of nature in terms of wanting to connect in a community and use their extra time in exchange for some extra cash. Profiles range from students to part-time yoga instructors, retirees and even full-time nine-to-five people who need to supplement their income by working on the weekends.”

GoGet’s website proudly states that it empowers the group to obtain larger productiveness and connectivity in on a regular basis work.

And there are quite a few testimonials from GoGetters to recommend this, among the many many:

● “Formerly in the corporate sector, being a GoGetter is a breath of fresh air for me due to the flexibility and ability to earn extra income.”

● “I am pursuing my actuarial science degree and joined GoGet to earn in my free time.”

● “My favourite jobs on GoGet are food and shopping jobs. Being a personal shopper helps me improve my communication skills.”

Retiree Soo Ngoh Choy is in her seventh 12 months of retirement and has had over 395 jobs with GoGet, whereas stay-at-home mum Cheryl Ong can tackle jobs and take care of her children.

It is comparatively straightforward to turn into a GoGetter. All you want is a smartphone, a knowledge plan, the GoGet app, and naturally, you should be 18 years outdated and above. Then simply scroll the app. If you see a job you want on the app, you’ll be able to settle for it and get linked immediately, then receives a commission when the job is completed. You will then have a working assertion in your app to see what your monetary statements appear to be as an earnings earner on GoGet.

GoGet is predominantly a B2B enterprise, Chia explains. “We join a verified community of individuals to businesses who want part-timers at no fastened price. So, the sort of goal shoppers that we’ve got ranged from MNCs and huge corporations to SMEs.”

Crunching the numbers with Xero

GoGet has over 2,500 businesses signed up to their community, primarily in F&B, retail and occasions in KL, Penang and Johor Baru. Some of the biggest corporations in Malaysia use GoGet to save prices and enhance productiveness, together with Petronas, Tune Talk, Celcom, Zalora and Lazada.

Chia explains that GoGet covers 4 important varieties of work: logistics, gross sales and advertising and marketing, administration and operations.

“For very large companies, we are typically their support during peak periods so when Lazada does its 11/11 sale, for example, it will use our GoGetters for support in its warehouses as packers.

“As for SMEs, we are there for them every day. They would use GoGetters to send flowers, pick up supplies, or even be pickers and packers of flowers in their store.”

GoGet turned to cloud accounting platform Xero to manage the exponentially growing volume of accounting work as well as simplify its business tasks.GoGet turned to cloud accounting platform Xero to handle the exponentially rising quantity of accounting work in addition to simplify its enterprise duties.

With so many GoGetters and shoppers to cope with, balancing the accounts is not any piece of cake. Chia shares that this is likely one of the important causes GoGet turned to cloud accounting platform Xero to handle the exponentially rising quantity of accounting work in addition to simplify its enterprise duties.

“Because we are a tech platform, the type of transactions that we have are large scale and they happen every day, in real time.

“It’s not just dealing with a few key clients and invoices. We work with millions of rows of data every month, and there’s no way a manual system would be able to handle it effectively.

“We needed something robust and scalable, and Xero has been a great solution. It is so much more seamless than running everything on Excel,” she says.

Chia is extremely grateful for the options Xero presents: First is how Xero is ready up – that’s, linked to your checking account both instantly or by way of a third-party answer, with financial institution feeds. Transactions then circulate securely straight into Xero every enterprise day. For banks that aren’t linked instantly with Xero, prospects can use Yodlee to import all transactions mechanically into their Xero app.

“We’re able to have a view of our bank account and categorise transactions into all the necessary account codes automatically. This is probably the feature we use most to make sure we close our books on time with accurate data,” says Chia, including that the everyday invoicing options, fee vouchers and citation options additionally come in useful and are consumer pleasant.

One of the largest beneficial properties Chia has noticed is the period of time saved. “It used to take me weeks to close the accounts, but the whole process happens in days now!”

Automating duties and accessing consumer information at any time has additionally turn into a cinch.

“My sales team doesn’t need to manually issue invoices anymore. Instead, we can easily just set the client’s name, regenerate, and send a new invoice. That’s at least 15 minutes of time saved each time, each invoice. In a month, you end up saving hours.”

But it’s not nearly making work loads simpler. Chia says that GoGet’s bigger imaginative and prescient is to empower the 270-million marginally expert inhabitants within the Asean area to have a trusted and secure answer to discover jobs.

And she is assured that with Xero’s support and dedication, GoGet will likely be in a position to focus its time and efforts on constructing a reliable and sustainable enterprise.

“Xero has allowed us to build and sustain a healthy business model, to know our numbers in terms of costs as well as revenue, and confidently make strategic decisions and grow in the right places,” she says.

“These are very important for us to attain our imaginative and prescient. Xero empowers us with information and permits us to make selections at a quicker fee. That has a huge effect on how we develop as an organization.”



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