For accounting firms
Software for Melbourne accounting firms whose tools no longer agree.
For 10-50 person CA and CPA practices where Xero says one thing, XPM says another and Karbon still has the client sitting in a draft. We build the database underneath the practice. A single source of truth the existing tools read from, instead of four systems each holding a different version of the same client.
What we hear from partners and practice managers
Most of the partners we meet are drowning in admin. The same five complaints turn up at every Melbourne firm we sit down with. They are not Xero's fault, or XPM's, or anyone else's in particular. They are what happens when each tool has its own database and nobody owns the view across them.
- Xero, XPM and Karbon do not talk. Client details get double-handled three times. A name change in Karbon never makes it back to Xero. A new client gets added to the practice manager but not the ledger, and nobody finds out until the first bill goes unsent. Read the Xero, Karbon and XPM integration write-up.
- The wheels come off every BAS season. Lodgement deadlines tracked across LodgeiT, a partner's calendar and a shared spreadsheet. The week before each quarterly cut-off, staff are working late because the systems do not surface what is actually due, when, for whom. The data problems no one warns you about when moving from Xero to Karbon are usually where this starts.
- Practice managers hit a ceiling. XPM and Karbon were built to do specific jobs well. They are not the place to model your firm's actual workflows, your specific approval steps, or the thing your senior partner has always done by hand and never written down.
- Paying senior people to do junior work. Manual entry between FYI and the practice manager. Then there is the quarterly Xero/XPM time-entry reconciliation, by hand. And the duplicate cleanup after a CAS360 ASIC sync. Hours that should be partner-billable, gone.
- No single view of a client. "Where are we up to with the Smith family?" takes ten minutes of clicking through XPM, FYI, Karbon and the email thread. Multiply that across a week of client conversations. We have written about the hidden cost of running a 30-person firm without a real CRM, and when partners ask whether the answer is Salesforce, our take on a custom CRM versus Salesforce for a 30-person firm.
None of these get fixed by another point tool. They get fixed by deciding which system owns which field and putting a real database underneath. That is the work we do. See how we approach the integration side when the Xero, XPM and Karbon stack already exists and you do not want to throw it out, or browse our full custom-software services for the broader picture.
Tools we work with
Ledger
Xero, MYOB
The ledger is the source of truth for the books, not for the practice. We build the integration layer that pushes invoices and bills out of the practice manager and reconciles what the ledger thinks against what the time entries say.
Practice management
XPM, Karbon
Workflow, time entry and job tracking live here. The trick is keeping client records aligned with Xero on one side and FYI on the other, and surfacing the work that XPM does not natively show: capacity by partner, BAS pipeline by quarter, jobs at risk.
Documents
FYI, SuiteFiles, SharePoint
Client document store, working papers, source files. The pain is not the tool. It is making sure a new job in Karbon creates the right folder structure in FYI without anyone clicking, and that staff find files by client name rather than by scrolling.
Tax and lodgement
LodgeiT, Tax Assistant, CAS360
Lodgement deadlines, workpapers and ASIC corporate compliance. We build the visibility layer on top. What is due this week across every client, who has signed, who has not, what is blocking. The data is there; the question is who looks at it before Friday afternoon.
Reporting
Power BI, Spotlight, Fathom
Client-facing financial reporting and internal practice metrics. We connect the ledger and the practice manager into one dataset so partners stop reconciling in spreadsheets the night before the partners' meeting.
The plumbing
The custom layer
Most of the value sits in what your firm has always done in spreadsheets, on whiteboards, or in one partner's head. Onboarding flows, fee-setting logic, scope-creep tracking, partner approval gates. We model that explicitly in the database so the firm runs the same on the day a senior partner takes a holiday.
Adjacent proof / Melbourne wealth practice
The practice stopped depending on one person who understood the database.
We have not yet shipped a publicly-named accounting case study. The closest pattern from our recent work is a Melbourne wealth practice running on a fragile Access database. Different ledger, different practice manager. Same shape of broken, same database-first answer. Read the wealth practice CRM case study for the longer write-up of the adjacent pattern.
In that engagement, manual data entry dropped roughly 80%, and a single point of failure (the one person who understood the database) became a documented system anyone in the firm could pick up. The reason it transfers to accounting is structural: the pain comes from each tool owning its own copy of the truth, not from the tools themselves.
What we hear
It's updating the ATO because you've got to update in so many spots and then the ABR is like, they're different systems but they should talk to each other but they don't.
The engagement path
Discovery call
30 minutes with Marty (founder, doing this since 2007). You describe the firm, the tools, the bits that actually hurt. We tell you honestly whether what you are describing sounds like an integration job, a custom-software job, or something a sharper Karbon configuration would solve faster and cheaper. No pitch.
Systems diagnostic
A fixed-price piece of work. Most partners we meet have been burned by an IT project that went over budget, so the diagnostic exists to put a real number on the table first. We map where each piece of client data lives, who edits it, and which fields actually matter. You finish with a written diagnostic, a prioritised list of fixes and a scoped estimate.
Integration or custom build
Most accounting firms need both. The integration layer puts Xero, XPM, Karbon and FYI on speaking terms via a real database. The custom build models the work that does not fit any of those tools: the partner approval flows, the BAS pipeline view, the onboarding dance. We build them in stages so the firm sees value inside the first quarter.
Ongoing support
We do not build and walk away. Vendors change APIs, ATO portals change, your firm grows. We stay on as a small ongoing engagement, usually a few hours a month, so the system gets fixed when it breaks and grows when the firm grows. The same person who built it picks up the phone.
We have been running this engagement model since 2007. See how we work.
Not sure if your firm needs custom software or a sharper Xero setup?
Start with a 30-minute discovery call. We will tell you honestly. Most Melbourne accounting firms we talk to are one good integration away from getting their senior people back. And if the diagnostic finds nothing worth fixing, you walk away with a clean bill of health for your systems.