By Craig Howard, News EditorShare: April 25, 2011 — Jacquie Gramlow has always paid attention to detail, going back to the days when she was a junior at Mead High School and began working as a bookkeeper for a local housepainting company.
Over five decades later, Gramlow still maintains a meticulous approach to numbers as the owner/operator of Grannie's Bookkeeping Service.
"I appreciate bookkeeping as an exact science," Gramlow said. "You know that two and two will equal four, not five."
Gramlow took subjects like typing, shorthand and bookkeeping in high school before receiving a scholarship to Kenman Business College in Spokane to study bookkeeping. Over the years, she has monitored the books for a variety of companies, including those run by her late husband, David, who passed away in 2008.
Jacquie Gramlow brings over five decades of experience to her self-owned company, Grannie's Bookkeeping Service. A longtime resident of the Bigelow Gulch area, Gramlow is a public notary and specializes in programs like Quickbooks, Peachtree, Microsoft Excel, Access and Word. Photo by Craig Howard.
Whether maintaining a carrot crop on 180 acres in the Bigelow Gulch area of north Spokane or selling pellet stoves through an original venture called Techniflame (which now specializes in RV and boat storage), David and Jacquie made a stellar team. The couple was married for 47 years. Their family includes four children and seven grandchildren.
Jacquie was born in southern Idaho and lived in Utah with her family for a short time before they moved to the Spokane area when she was 5. Along with a series of vast transitions to the local landscape, Gramlow has seen numerous changes to her career field, beginning with dramatic improvements in technology.
From the pre-carbon copy days of maintaining a bookkeeping ledger by hand to working with contemporary programs like Quickbooks, Gramlow said her work has become easier and more efficient over time. With a grasp of the latest in high-tech systems, she now specializes in helping companies as a bookkeeping consultant.
"It's really changed a lot," she said. "I remember a time when everything was done in ink."
Gramlow recalls the first computer her husband brought home in the mid-1980s. The device may have made bookkeeping easier but it was not about to win any awards for aesthetic value.
"It wasn't quite as big as the original IBM computers, but it was a monster," Gramlow said.
The stereotypical stress of tax season is something that Gramlow anticipates and deals with - pragmatically - each year. Part of her secret to dealing with anxiety is typical of her business strategy - remaining cool and calm while addressing tasks with a step-by-step approach.
"It's work that has to be done," she said. "I've been handed a shoebox of receipts before and told someone has an audit coming up. My job is to get things on the right track."
A public notary, Gramlow specializes in what is known as "full charge bookkeeping," including payroll, bank reconciliation and financial reports. She also organizes prevailing and non-prevailing state and federal reports on a monthly, quarterly and annual basis.
A member of the 15th Ward in the Spokane Valley Stake, Gramlow recalls a time when the Spokane Stake encompassed a sprawling region that included parts of Idaho and Montana and areas north to the Canadian border. Decades before the Spokane - or Seattle - Temples, church members would travel to the Cardston, Alberta Temple.
"I think sometimes people take the growth of the Church here for granted," Gramlow said. "It's really been amazing."
