Xero can do your BAS and knows nothing about what a Geraldton quota lease costs

Budget $40,000 to $110,000 AUD. A settlement engine with unit costing and ledger integration runs $40,000 to $60,000 over three to four months. Adding pool accruals, fuel tax credits and a cost allocation model takes it to $85,000, with multi entity consolidation at the top.

Almost certainly not. GST, BAS lodgement, Single Touch Payroll and tax tables change regularly and are handled well by established products at low cost. We build the industry specific layer above the ledger and post clean summarised journals down into it, so compliance stays simple.

Yes, and it is usually the highest value piece. Trip revenue, fuel, bait, levies, quota lease and agreed share percentages produce a settlement statement per trip that the skipper and crew can both read. Consistent, transparent calculation removes an argument that costs far more in goodwill than in dollars.

By calculating from actual usage rather than estimating. Vessel hours, machine hours and litres drawn feed the calculation with the correct rate applied to eligible off road use. Operators who move from estimation to measurement usually find the claim was being understated.

Delivery and payment are modelled separately, with accruals raised at delivery and settled as instalments arrive. That removes a manual month end exercise and gives you a true position on tonnes delivered versus cash received without waiting for the final pool payment.

Yes, provided they are involved in the design, which we insist on. They keep a conventional ledger and gain a system that answers management questions. The reconciliation control report between the custom layer and the ledger is built for them specifically.

Yes, and that is generally the reason clients start. Revenue and direct costs attach to the trip, paddock or job, and overhead is allocated on rules you set and can change. The result is a monthly answer to which parts of the business are actually earning rather than a quarterly guess.

Three to four months for a core build, then usually two months of parallel running before you rely on it. Financial systems need a proving period, and we build a control report from day one so you can see the custom layer and the ledger agreeing before you trust either.

Around 12 to 15 percent of build cost annually. Rates and thresholds change, allocation policies get revised, and new revenue lines need modelling. That is normal ongoing work rather than a sign of a poor build, and businesses that budget for it get far more from the system.

Xero stays cheaper as long as its workflows fit your business, since even its top plan costs around $1,000 a year and custom development starts around $25,000. The math flips once you stack add-ons: companies Digital Heroes scopes after they have bolted inventory, job costing, and approval apps onto Xero are usually paying more for the app stack and the labor of keeping five tools in sync than for Xero itself. Custom wins when the real cost is that labor and its errors, not the license fee.

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.

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.

It scales exactly as far as its data model was designed to, so multi-entity support, multi-currency, and consolidation should be day-one design decisions even if you launch with a single company. Retrofitting multi-entity onto a single-entity ledger is among the most expensive changes we handle, and in Digital Heroes rescue work it often costs a third of the original build. Compare that with QuickBooks Online, which requires a separate subscription for every company you add.

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.

Neither is secure by default; security tracks the practices of whoever builds and operates the system, not the model. SaaS gives you the vendor's certifications and patching but puts your data in a shared multi-tenant platform on their terms, while custom gives you full control over data residency, access rules, and compliance requirements like HIPAA, with the responsibility sitting with you and your agency. Before hiring anyone for a system holding sensitive data, ask for their security checklist: encryption at rest and in transit, an OWASP Top 10 review, role-based access, and a penetration test before launch.

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.

Bring three things: the 5 to 10 workflows that hurt most today, sample data such as your chart of accounts and a redacted month of transactions, and a list of every system the software must connect to, including banks and payroll. You do not need a formal spec; a good agency writes that with you during discovery. In our experience buyers who arrive with concrete workflow pain get accurate quotes, and buyers who arrive with a feature wishlist get padded ones.

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