Xero closes your Bath books, until vouchers, tronc, and three venues need a spreadsheet again

In our delivery experience a custom accounting build for a Bath business runs £45,000 to £130,000. A custom layer over Xero handling vouchers and tronc sits around £45,000 to £68,000 and ships in four to five months.

Usually not. The honest answer for most Bath businesses is a custom layer that adds the logic off-the-shelf lacks, deferred vouchers, tronc, and consolidation, while Xero or QuickBooks stays as the core ledger for Making Tax Digital.

It treats a voucher as deferred revenue, a liability, until it is redeemed, then releases the income at redemption. That is more accurate than booking voucher sales as immediate revenue, which overstates a busy December.

Yes. It records the tronc distribution fairly and defensibly in line with UK tipping rules, so tips are not sitting in an undocumented spreadsheet at month-end.

Yes, by feeding a compatible ledger like Xero or QuickBooks that files under Making Tax Digital. The custom layer adds logic without breaking your HMRC compliance.

Yes. It produces consolidated and inter-venue reporting that the standard chart of accounts smears together, removing the monthly spreadsheet your finance team rebuilds by hand.

You should own both. A reputable Bath agency transfers the code and hands you the data on final payment, so sensitive financial information is never trapped with a supplier.

Closely, and that is a good thing. Your accountant reviews and signs off the deferred revenue, tronc, and consolidation logic before go-live, so the numbers are defensible.

Budget roughly 15 to 20 percent of the build a year, plus attention when HMRC or accounting rules change. Financial logic must stay current, so ongoing support is essential.

A strong freelancer is fine for a reporting dashboard or one integration; anything that holds your books needs a team. Ledger software requires backend, frontend, QA, and accounting domain knowledge, and one person rarely covers all four while staying available for the 5 to 10 year life of the system. The most common rescue job Digital Heroes takes on is a solo-built ledger with no tests and no documentation after the freelancer moved on.

No, most software projects run fully remote without any quality penalty, and what actually matters is 3 to 4 hours of working-hour overlap and a fixed weekly demo call. A team based in Bath earns its premium in specific cases: hardware installations, warehouse or clinic floor shadowing, and discovery workshops where watching your staff work beats any written brief. Choose for senior engineers and a track record first, and treat geography as a tiebreaker.

Yes, but not in the way most buyers expect: the goal is boring, popular technology such as React, Node.js or Python, and PostgreSQL, because any future team can maintain it and hiring a replacement developer takes days, not months. The red flag is an agency-proprietary framework or an unusual language, which welds you to that one vendor no matter what your contract says about code ownership. A useful test: could you find three freelancers fluent in this stack within a week? If not, push back.

A boring, proven one. Digital Heroes defaults to PostgreSQL for the ledger because transactional integrity is non-negotiable, a typed backend such as Node with TypeScript, .NET, or Java, and standard React on the front end. The avoid list is clearer than the pick list: floating point math for money, a NoSQL database as the primary ledger store, and any framework young enough that hiring for it in three years will be a problem.

You should, completely, through a written intellectual property assignment that transfers everything on final payment; without that clause, copyright stays with whoever wrote the code by default. Insist that the repository lives in your own GitHub organization from day one and that hosting, domains, and third-party accounts are registered to you. Also check for licenses to the agency's proprietary frameworks buried in the contract, because those can make switching vendors practically impossible even when you own your own code.

You should, outright, and the contract must say so with an explicit IP assignment clause rather than a usage license. Insist that the code lives in a repository you control from day one, so nothing, including the ledger schema and migration scripts, can be held back at the final invoice. Third-party libraries and any framework the agency reuses stay under their own licenses, and a clean contract lists exactly which those are.

Yes, and connecting your existing tools is one of the main reasons to build custom: mainstream platforms like QuickBooks, Stripe, Shopify, and Google Workspace all publish documented APIs. Budget 1 to 3 weeks of work per integration depending on API quality and how much data flows in both directions. Ask any vendor whether they have integrated with your specific tools before, because quirks like QuickBooks' OAuth token handling and API rate limits get learned on someone's project, and it should not be yours.

At minimum: encryption at rest and in transit, role-based access control, and immutable audit logs recording every change to the ledger. If outside parties rely on your numbers you will want SOC 2 style controls, and storing card data pulls you into PCI DSS, which most builds avoid by tokenizing payments through Stripe or a similar processor. Your industry adds its own rules, so compliance requirements belong in the written spec, not in a post-launch retrofit.

Three to five for a typical focused build: a project lead, one or two engineers, a designer, and part-time QA, which is the standard shape across 2,000+ Digital Heroes projects. Larger platforms justify 6 to 10, but a ten-person team on a small first version usually signals bill padding rather than horsepower. What predicts success is whether a senior engineer is writing your code daily, not the headcount on the proposal.

Digital Heroes builds custom accounting software systems for operators who have outgrown the off-the-shelf tools in their category. The work is delivered remotely: our engineers work from Delhi and Lucknow, leadership is in New York, and some team members live in London and Sydney and work remotely from there. We have no office in Bath. You can chat with the team directly, and every form gets an email reply within 24 hours.