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Leeds Live
Leeds Live
National
Lucy Marshall

Award-winning Leeds company paving the way for women in business

A Leeds female family business has won a hero award for championing women in the finance industry.

Whitesides Chartered Accountants opened in 1989 and has had great success since. Joanne Whiteside founded the practice 33 years ago and later hired her daughter. The pair managed to double both the turnover of the business and the staff by 2015.

The company now has 10 accounts, bookkeepers, tax and payroll specialists who help businesses in Leeds. Recently the company, based in Horsforth, won an MP HERoes award for their contribution to the local community. MP for Pudsey, Stuart Andrew, nominated the firm due to their "integrity that shines from within" the heavily female led firm.

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The MP HERoes award was created by Savvitas in partnership with NatWest to allow local MPs to celebrate female entrepreneurship throughout the country across all sectors and industries. The MP HERoes award has been a "great achievement" for the firm and a "brilliant way" for the company to celebrate the success of Joanne Whiteside in the year of her retirement.

Stuart Andrew said: "I was delighted to nominate Joanne Whiteside and Sarah Greenwood of Whitesides Chartered Accountants as my MP HERoes. Joanne and Sarah do excellent work in my constituency of Pudsey, Horsforth and Aireborough by making a longstanding contribution to the community, assisting local businesses, and creating local jobs.

"I’m glad to support the MP HERoes programme and proud to champion women-owned businesses and the wide-ranging benefits they bring to the UK economy."

Director of Whitesides Chartered Accountants, Sarah Greenwood said: "Women need to see and have access to other women who have managed to be successful in their chosen career. I was lucky enough to have that role model in my mother, but that isn’t always the case, so it’s great to see initiatives such as MP HERoes showcasing this."

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