Your finance team closes the books in Xero, then rebuilds per-production margin in a spreadsheet every wrap

Often not. Many Wellington firms keep Xero as the general ledger and add a custom costing layer that attributes costs to overlapping jobs and recognises grant revenue correctly. A full custom ledger is only needed when Xero genuinely can't be the base.

Xero is a general ledger built for clean department-based accounting. It can't natively split a shared editor's time across three overlapping productions or recognise grant tranches against milestones, so per-job margin becomes a manual spreadsheet rebuild.

Yes. Whether it's a costing layer or a full build, IRD integration for GST returns and payday filing stays in place, so compliance is correct underneath the job-costing intelligence.

NZD 70,000 to 240,000. A costing layer on Xero is at the low end; a full accounting build with grant revenue, multi-entity consolidation, and IRD filing reaches the top.

It recognises grant and milestone income against delivery milestones the way the NZ Film Commission and similar funders actually pay, instead of treating it as flat deferred revenue, which is how a project P&L gets distorted.

Nothing dramatic, if the engagement was set up correctly: the code sits in your repository, hosting runs on your cloud account, and a handover document explains how to deploy and operate the system. Any competent replacement team can then take over in days rather than months. If the agency controls the repo, the servers, or the domain, fix that now, because renegotiating access during a dispute is the most expensive place to discover the problem.

A skilled freelancer is the right call for a single-discipline scope under roughly $15,000, like a website, a plugin, or one integration. Above that, projects need design, backend, testing, and project management at once, and a solo builder becomes the single point of failure: if they get sick or take a bigger client, your project simply stops. Agencies bill 20-40% more per hour but carry continuity, code review, and someone to escalate to, which is what you are actually buying.

Move when you are paying people to work around the tool, not when the subscription feels expensive. Common triggers are hitting the 25-user cap on QuickBooks Online Advanced, consolidating multiple entities in spreadsheets, or a billing model that forces manual journal entries every month. If your team spends several hours a week exporting to Excel just to answer basic questions, you are already paying for custom software in salaries.

Almost always yes, through CSV exports or the vendor's API, and migration should be scoped as its own workstream with field mapping, a dry run, and a planned cutover window rather than an afterthought. The real time sink is rarely moving the data; it is cleaning it, since years of duplicates, free-text fields, and inconsistent formats surface all at once. Pull a full export from your current vendor before committing to anything new, because some SaaS plans restrict exports on lower tiers.

Most small business accounting builds land between $25,000 and $75,000 for a working first version, while a full double-entry platform with invoicing, payroll, and reporting runs $100,000 to $250,000. Across 2,000+ projects at Digital Heroes, the biggest cost driver is how many external systems the software must connect to, not the accounting logic itself. A tool that automates a single painful workflow, like reconciliation or job costing, can come in under $20,000.

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.

The standard Digital Heroes team is 4 to 6 people: a backend developer, a frontend developer, a QA engineer, a part-time designer, and a project lead who owns the accounting logic. A single-workflow automation can ship with two people, while multi-entity platforms with payroll can need eight. Headcount matters less than having one named person accountable for the books balancing.

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.

Yes, but scope it around one complete workflow rather than a thin slice of everything. A strong first release fully owns, say, invoicing and receivables while QuickBooks keeps running the general ledger, letting you validate the software with real money movement in 10 to 14 weeks. In Digital Heroes projects, one-workflow MVPs reach a stable full system faster than big-bang replacements almost every time.

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.

It encodes your actual business rules: progress billing tied to project milestones, revenue recognition for your specific contract types, landed cost tracking, or approval chains that match your org chart. Off-the-shelf tools handle generic bookkeeping well but force every business into the same chart of accounts and workflow. FreshBooks, for example, is built around freelancer-style invoicing, so inventory or multi-entity accounting means leaving the product entirely.

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