Xero closes your Christchurch month beautifully and still cannot tell you whether the Kaiapoi job made money

NZD 55,000 to NZD 95,000 for a job costing and work in progress layer over Xero, delivered in 12 to 16 weeks. A full financial operations layer with retentions and multi entity consolidation runs NZD 130,000 to NZD 190,000. These are our own delivery bands for comparable New Zealand builds.

Almost never. Xero handles GST, bank feeds, payday filing and everything your accountant expects, and rebuilding that is expensive with no upside. Build the job costing, work in progress and retention layer that Xero lacks, and post summarised journals down into it.

Yes, and it should be a headline requirement. You need a ledger of retentions held per subcontractor, evidence of how the money is held, release dates linked to practical completion and defect liability periods, and the ability to produce a statement for a subcontractor on request. Treating this as a report rather than a data structure is the mistake we see most often.

Continuously, using a percentage complete method your accountant approves, typically cost to cost or certified value. Costs post as they are incurred, revenue is recognised against progress, and the difference is your work in progress or income in advance. The value is having it correct daily rather than rebuilt monthly in a spreadsheet.

Yes. Each entity keeps its own Xero organisation for statutory purposes, and the custom layer consolidates with intercompany elimination for management reporting. For groups running a contracting company alongside a property or plant entity, this replaces a multi day manual merge with an on demand report.

Usually yes, because Xero stays the system of record for statutory reporting and they keep the tool they know. Involve them in design so the revenue recognition treatment and the journals posted are ones they will sign off. Accountants object to being surprised, not to better operational data.

With a reconciliation report built on day one, run monthly, showing every difference and its cause. Assign one person to clear it. Systems drift when nobody owns the reconciliation, and once the two disagree by an unexplained amount people stop trusting both.

No, and it should not. Transactions are coded correctly in the operational layer and posted to Xero, which files. Building direct filing for one company creates a maintenance obligation with no benefit, and the value of the custom work is coding accuracy on retentions and progress claims, which is where GST errors actually start.

Around fourteen weeks to the first run, then two to three months of running both in parallel until the numbers agree without intervention. Do not switch off the old process before three consecutive clean reconciliations. Every business that shortcuts this ends up doing an unplanned catch up later.

A focused first version takes 10 to 16 weeks, and a complete QuickBooks-class replacement takes 6 to 9 months. In Digital Heroes delivery data, schedules slip most often during data migration and bank feed integration, so we budget those two phases at double the first estimate. Treat any promise of a full accounting system in under two months as a warning sign.

Agency rates in markets like Christchurch typically run $100 to $200 per hour against $25 to $60 offshore, but the hourly rate is not the project cost. Across 2,000+ Digital Heroes projects, the setup that consistently works is a hybrid: senior architects and a named lead for your project with a distributed build team behind them, which lands total cost well below all-local without the rework cycles that pure lowest-bid offshore engagements produce. Compare bids on total delivered cost with maintenance included, never on rate cards.

Yes, and it should be treated as standard scope rather than an add-on. Bank feeds typically come through aggregators like Plaid, payments through Stripe or your existing processor's API, and payroll providers such as Gusto and ADP publish APIs for pulling journal entries. The real constraint is smaller regional banks without feed coverage, which is worth verifying during scoping instead of discovering after launch.

Divide the build cost by the monthly benefit, where benefit is hours saved times loaded hourly cost, plus subscription fees replaced, plus any revenue the software unlocks. Three staff saving 10 hours a week each at a $40 loaded rate is about $62,000 a year, which pays back a $60,000 build in roughly 12 months. Across Digital Heroes internal-tool projects, 12 to 24 months is the normal payback range, and anything projecting under 6 months usually means the spreadsheet is hiding costs.

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.

Ask to see a live accounting or fintech system they built, then ask how they handle double-entry integrity, period closing, and audit trails; a team that has never built a ledger will learn on your budget. Check whether they bring an accountant or finance-literate analyst into scoping sessions. A portfolio proves design skill, but a walkthrough of how their system blocks an unbalanced journal entry proves domain skill.

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 Christchurch. You can chat with the team directly, and every form gets an email reply within 24 hours.