Guest Interview Series (Tech) – with Alfred Ang from CALTRiX

Alfred Ang is the CEO and Founder of cloud accounting implementor CALTRiX, which aims to help businesses kickstart and enhance their digital transformation journey with the aid of cloud accounting services and integrated cloud solutions like Talenox. The solopreneur aims to continually develop his team and empower the SME community with digitalisation. In this article, he shares more about his journey as a specialist in cloud accounting transformation and what it took for him to develop CALTRiX from scratch.

Hi there, Alfred. Thanks for taking the time to speak to us. Could you begin by telling us a little about CALTRiX and what inspired you to develop it?

Hi everyone, CALTRiX specializes in helping SMEs with Xero and Talenox Implementation. Back in 2018, I foresaw Cloud Accounting & Payroll as the future trend which should be adopted by SMEs. That’s because as a business owner, I was facing difficulties in getting real-time financial information to make more precise decisions in order to stay competitive and relevant in this fast-changing business environment.

Therefore, I was inspired to build CALTRiX to help more SMEs towards successful digital transformation. 

What have you enjoyed most about starting CALTRiX?

I enjoyed all the processes of building CALTRiX because there was no reference/direct competitor when we started in 2018. 

It was like piecing puzzles together. I had to find the right piece of the puzzle to fill up the right gap. In my case, I’ve done lots of research to find the right solution to adopt and practice digitalization internally as well as for our clients. 

And most of the time, I have to invest in many different cloud solutions in the market to try out their features and quality of support services including the response time. Although the process is very challenging, I had lots of fun doing it!

CALTRiX is a Xero Gold Partner and Talenox Gold Payroll Expert in Malaysia. What do you think are the most important aspects of CALTRiX’s operations that helped you successfully achieve this milestone?

The main important aspect is the digitalization of our internal operations. Almost all areas of our business operations are using cloud software, which helps in business efficiency. 

Here are some examples on the software we used internally:

And those cloud solutions adopted by us will be recommended to our clients because it has been tested and proven useful towards digitalization.

And of course, another aspect is my team efforts. I want to give the credits to my current teammates and ex-colleagues. Without their awesome dedication and sacrifices, we will not be able to achieve all these milestones. 

Throughout your company’s growth, were there any challenges or setbacks that you encountered at the beginning? And knowing what you know now, what would you have done anything differently?

The first thing that came into my mind was choosing the right software partner. We spent much of our time in the past identifying the best partner and I believe we can save lots of time and resources if we met partners like Talenox in earlier days. 

In Talenox, I am really grateful to have met Gordon, Edwin and Nicholas back in 2019. CALTRiX actually became the first Talenox Partner in Malaysia right after our first that meet-up. From there on, everyone in Talenox has given their full support to us till today. 

So, what is CALTRiX working on now?

Currently, we are still focusing on growing CALTRiX’s market share in both the cloud accounting and payroll space. Since 2019, we have had consistent growth but I believe we still have plenty of room for improvement. 

In the meantime, we are also exploring our potential as part of the Cloud Solution ecosystem. The main focus is to create a sustainable solution to solve the pain points in the E-Commerce industry from an accounting perspective – in other words, make accountants’ lives easier. 

What do you think is the future of CALTRiX? And what kind of role will CALTRiX play in that future?

CALTRiX’s near future is always focusing on the implementation of cloud accounting and payroll software so our expertise can help SMEs build a more solid digitalization roadmap of 1-3 years. We believe that automation from solid integrations between cloud software will save SMEs more time and reduce human errors.

As mentioned above, we also hope that we could play a bigger role in the cloud ecosystem through building our own cloud solution to create greater positive impacts to SMEs, not only to Malaysia but also to Southeast Asia. Simultaneously, we will do our best to align ourselves with United Nation Sustainable Goals (UNSD), which contributes to social and environmental impacts.

It is widely agreed in the industry that company culture plays a huge role in attracting and retaining top talent. What is your definition of a great company culture?

My own definition of a great company culture comprises 3 key elements: Attitude, Empowerment, Innovation.

With the right attitude and empowerment from more development opportunities, a company can drive both innovation and creativity.

Thanks for taking the time out to speak to us. We wish you and CALTRiX continued success.

Thanks to Talenox for giving us the opportunity to share our thoughts too. And all the best to Talenox as well!