One of our clients had a trusted bookkeeper of 20 years who was ready to retire, and uses an industry specific legacy software system with attached accounting package. The legacy system could not be upgraded to a cloud-based accounting system due to its interdependency with other parts of the business.

We worked with the retiring bookkeeper in a sensitive and respectful way to document all the procedures and business knowledge from their 20 years of experience and create a transition plan over a period of 6 weeks. This involved meeting with the bookkeeper via Zoom (all during Covid) and picking up each piece of the bookkeeping work during the transition, training on the legacy software.

This included accounts payable entry, subsidiary Ledger reconciliations, bank reconciliations, payroll, manual FX and GST calculations and Journal entries. The nature of this software meant that a deep understanding of Debits and Credits, Profit and Loss and Balance sheet account flow was essential.

In order to produce meaningful reporting, we also created a process to upload raw data into Xero to enable Management reporting against Budgets which had not been available on a timely basis before this point.