Jo Luk never planned on becoming an accountant twice.
After earning her CPA in 2006 and her CFP in 2006, she stepped away from corporate accounting and financial planning in search of something deeper: a sense of purpose and what she was meant to do with her life. That search took her to China, where she spent a year volunteering at an orphanage followed by a year at Bible school.
When she returned home, she followed another dream and opened a bookstore. Running the business gave her a firsthand understanding of entrepreneurship: the long hours, financial pressures, uncertainty, and the reality of wearing countless hats just to keep a small business moving forward.
Although the bookstore eventually closed, the experience stayed with her. When Luk returned to accounting and financial planning, she did so with a very different perspective. She was no longer just the professional looking at the numbers; she had been the entrepreneur on the other side of the table. She understood the pressures her clients faced because she had lived them herself.
Later, with young children at home, Luk wanted to continue using her expertise while having the flexibility to be present for her family. She started her own practice, Bloom Accounting, where her experiences as a CPA, CFP and entrepreneur continue to shape the way she serves and advises business owners today.
Looking back, Luk realized that finding her purpose didn't necessarily mean leaving behind the gifts she already had. It meant finding a more meaningful way to use them.
“We're all given gifts from the start; the work is just recognizing them,” she said. “That's where the name ‘Bloom’ comes from: bloom where you're planted.”
Manual checks were costing clients more than money
A traditional accounting firm sticks to year-end taxes and annual engagements — T1s, T2s, compilations, reviews, audits. Jo wanted Bloom to offer more, without requiring clients to have an expensive in-house finance department.
Many clients relied on paper checks to be issued, physically carried, and signed. For one client in particular, Jo had been personally cutting checks biweekly for twelve years.
In other cases, business owners were pre-signing entire batches of blank checks for whoever processed payables — defeating the entire point of a signature as an internal control.
She also saw a recurring issue during reconciliations: bookkeepers entering a bill, then instead of applying the payment against it, logging it separately as a new expense.
The result is a bank account that balances, but a P&L that's been double-expensed, and an accounts payable balance that's overstated without anyone noticing.
Bringing Plooto in-house first, then to clients
Jo adopted Plooto for Bloom's own books before she ever recommended it to a client, starting with the firm's recurring billing.
No more chasing invoices, waiting on payments, or manually logging e-transfers.
She now uses Plooto to round out Bloom's client-facing services, turning a firm that once did taxes and little else into something closer to a full-cycle accounting team.
Now Bloom offers three tiers, priced from $500 to $5,000 a month: basic bookkeeping, a mid-level package, and a full-cycle CFO offering.
Syncing Plooto with QuickBooks Online addressed clients' reconciliation issues automatically. Once a bill is paid through Plooto, it's automatically marked as paid in QuickBooks, so no one can accidentally re-enter it as a separate expense. The bank stays balanced, and so does AP.
Jo also leaned on her Customer Success Manager when a client had questions about fees and international payments.
"I reached out, and my rep was incredibly helpful,” she said. “He set up a meeting with all of us, walked through the features, and answered every question. It made the onboarding process so much smoother and gave us both the confidence to partner with Plooto going forward."
Her first three-week vacation in 12 years
Before Plooto, Jo was cutting checks biweekly for one client for 12 years. This limited the time she could spend away from her firm.
For a firm built from the ground up around flexibility, it's a fitting payoff: the same technology that let Bloom expand client offerings is also giving its founder back her own time.
