What financial systems means here
Financial systems at Bedstone is custom engineering against the operational and accounting workflows that move money through the business. Not a generic SaaS reskin. Not a Xero add-on with a custom logo. We build the systems your finance team actually operates: invoicing, reconciliation, approvals, reporting, consolidation, payroll integration, payment rails, supplier and customer ledgers, and the data layer that feeds management reporting.
What we do not do: replace a working accounting platform with custom code for the sake of it (Xero, MYOB, NetSuite stay where they fit), build offshore-style invoicing portals without compliance baked in, or take on bookkeeping or tax-advisory work itself. We build the systems your finance team and tax advisor operate.
Where this fits
Custom financial systems are the right call when most of the following are true. If fewer than half apply, off-the-shelf SaaS plus light integration is usually more cost-effective.
- Your business model breaks the assumptions of generic finance SaaS: multi-entity, multi-jurisdiction, complex revenue recognition, custom billing rules, project-based or usage-based pricing.
- The finance team is filling SaaS gaps with spreadsheets, manual reconciliation, and copy-paste between tools. The "system" is held together by tribal knowledge.
- Audit prep takes weeks because the data is scattered across five tools and three spreadsheet versions.
- Compliance obligations (ATO, BAS, AUSTRAC, payroll tax across states, super) require workflows that the generic SaaS does not handle cleanly.
- You have integrations across accounting, billing, banking, CRM, and operations that need to talk to each other in near real time.
- You have budget allocated for the engagement and a finance lead who will adopt the system after handover.
What we build
Concrete patterns we have shipped to production. Most engagements combine several.
- Custom invoicing and billing platforms. Usage-based billing, project-based billing, recurring + one-off mixes, multi-currency, multi-entity, integrated payment collection. For businesses where the billing rules do not fit a standard SaaS template.
- Reconciliation and ledger automation. Daily three-way reconciliation across accounting, billing, payment processor, and bank feeds. Automated anomaly detection. Reduces month-end close from weeks to days.
- Quote-to-cash workflows. Lead-to-quote-to-invoice-to-collection wired into your CRM, billing, and accounting. End-to-end pipeline visibility with stage-gate approvals where needed.
- Multi-entity consolidation. Group structures with intercompany eliminations, FX handling, and consolidated management reporting. For professional services groups, holding companies, and businesses operating across AU, NZ, and offshore entities.
- Finance and management dashboards. Real-time visibility into revenue, margins, cash position, AR aging, AP commitments. Built for the leadership team and the finance team, not generic BI templates.
- Approval workflows and spend controls. Multi-level expense, PO, and payment approvals with delegation rules, audit trails, and integration to accounting and banking. For businesses where authority matrices and audit defensibility matter.
- Compliance reporting automation. BAS, payroll tax, super, AUSTRAC, ASIC. Auto-generated from the underlying transaction data with the calculations and audit trail your tax specialist can file.
- AI-augmented finance operations. Document intelligence for invoice and receipt processing, agent-driven AP queries, automated supplier ledger reconciliation, GL classification assistance. Where the work is repetitive and rule-based but the input is unstructured.
- Integration layers between finance tools. Custom middleware connecting Xero, MYOB, NetSuite, Stripe, banks, payment processors, CRM, and operations systems. Replaces brittle Zapier chains with proper engineering.
- Migration and platform replacement. Moving off legacy finance systems, consolidating multiple finance tools into one, or rebuilding a generic SaaS implementation that no longer fits the business.
How we work
Five-step engagement from intake to rollout. We work on both a project basis and an ongoing basis. A fixed-scope project takes the system to production, then transitions to ongoing support and maintenance via monthly retainer, fractional engagement, or scheduled improvement sprints. One-off audits available for teams not yet ready to build.
- Audit. Department-by-department review of finance workflows. Map systems, data flows, approval chains, compliance touchpoints. Score each candidate problem for ROI and complexity.
- Scope sprint. Concrete plan with milestones, integration list, success metrics, compliance approach, R&D eligibility note. Signed off before any build starts.
- Proof of concept. Working system in your environment, against real data and real users. Not a slide deck.
- Verification. Adversarial testing, load testing, security review, finance-specific edge cases (rounding, currency, period-end), honest go-or-no-go on rollout.
- Rollout. Staged deploy, parallel-run against existing systems, monitoring, rollback paths, documentation. Handover training so your finance team operates the system without us.
Working with your IT and finance team
Finance systems touch the accounts your IT and finance teams already manage. We partner with them rather than route around them. We speak both languages: software engineers who understand database transactions, API integrations, and audit trails, and operators who understand the difference between AP and AR, BAS and IAS, accruals and cash.
In practice your IT team gets a clean access request with scopes spelled out, security implications stated up front, and integration documentation they can audit. Your finance team gets a system designed around how they actually work, not around what the engineer thinks finance does. We work to least-privilege scopes, document what we use, and hand the access back at engagement end.
What week one looks like
The audit phase is where most finance system projects drift. We compress it into a single sprint week so you have a concrete plan before the second invoice. Day-by-day shape:
- Day 1. Kickoff workshop. Two to three hours on-site (or video). Meet the finance team and the IT contact. Walk through the current month-end close, the worst recurring pain, and the systems that touch finance.
- Day 2. Finance team interviews. 30 to 45 minute conversations per role. AP, AR, payroll, controller, CFO. What takes longest, what gets manually fixed, what breaks at period-end.
- Day 3. System and data mapping. Hands-on with accounting, billing, banking feeds, ERP, CRM, payroll. Assess data shape, API access, reconciliation gaps, and current data quality.
- Day 4. Scoring and prioritisation. Every candidate workflow scored on four axes: dollar impact, headcount hours reclaimed, technical feasibility, compliance risk. Ranked shortlist with conservative ROI math.
- Day 5. Scope draft and review. Concrete plan, timeline, success metrics, integration list, compliance approach, R&D eligibility note. Sent before end of week, reviewed live the following Monday.
By end of week one you have an audit report, a ranked shortlist, a concrete scope document, and an honest read on whether to proceed. If we decide an engagement is not the right fit, you keep the audit and use it to brief whoever you engage next.
What you get at the end
By the end of a typical engagement you hold more than running software. You hold everything required to operate, support, audit, and extend the finance system in-house.
- The working system. Source code, infrastructure-as-code, database schema, deployment pipeline, monitoring stack. All yours.
- An audit trail by design. Every transaction, every approval, every change to a record is logged with who, when, and why. Queryable on demand for external audit or compliance review.
- Architecture and operational documentation. System diagrams, API references, data models, operational runbooks, period-end procedures. Enough that a successor finance team or IT lead can pick it up cold.
- Handover training. Working sessions with your finance team so they own the system. On-site by default for Brisbane and SEQ.
- A verification report. Load tests, security tests, integration tests, finance-specific edge case tests, documented go-live readiness.
- Monitoring and observability. Dashboards, alerting on reconciliation breaks and integration failures, structured logging.
- An R&D readiness pack. Sprint documentation aligned with the Australian R&D Tax Incentive so your tax specialist can file with confidence.
Custom finance systems vs alternatives
Most operators land on one of four options when their finance stack stops fitting. Each has trade-offs.
Generic finance SaaS (Xero, MYOB, NetSuite). Right when your business model fits the template. Predictable subscription, vendor maintains it, broad accountant familiarity. Less right when your billing model, multi-entity structure, or compliance obligations sit outside what the SaaS handles cleanly. Most mid-market businesses use SaaS as the ledger and supplement with custom systems for the parts that do not fit.
Enterprise ERP (SAP, Oracle, Workday). Right for very large enterprises with mature finance processes and dedicated implementation teams. Less right for mid-market operators who get crushed by the implementation cost and ongoing licence overhead for capability they will never use.
Offshore development shop. Cheaper hourly rates, but rarely the right call once you factor in the 43.5% R&D Tax Incentive available for engaging Australian operators. AU-specific finance considerations like ATO, BAS, payroll tax, super, AUSTRAC, and the operating context of an AU mid-market business are usually unfamiliar. Finance compliance mistakes are expensive to find late.
Australian custom finance systems partner. Senior engineers who understand finance workflows and Australian compliance. The team covers software, integrations, data, audit-ready logging, and infrastructure as one capability. Right when the business model is real, the workflows do not fit generic SaaS, and audit defensibility matters.
How to evaluate a partner
Six checks worth running before signing with any custom financial systems partner.
- Ask who actually writes the code. The named partner who sells, or someone you have never met. Finance systems need senior engineering throughout. Get LinkedIn profiles. The named seniors should be the named builders.
- Ask for a production reference handling money. "What is the most recent finance system you shipped that is processing transactions right now?" Finance systems live with the consequences of every bug. Honest answers take thirty seconds.
- Ask about audit and compliance approach. ATO, BAS, AUSTRAC, payroll, super. A real AU partner answers fluently. An offshore shop or US-centric firm will struggle.
- Ask about handover and parallel-run. Finance systems should run in parallel with the existing stack before cutover. If they cannot describe parallel-run methodology, you will be debugging in production with real money at stake.
- Ask about edge cases. Multi-currency rounding, period-end accruals, refunds, voids, partial payments, FX revaluation. Experienced finance engineers have war stories. The rest hand-wave.
- Ask for the audit deliverable shape. Department-by-department workflow map, scored candidates, ROI math, prioritised shortlist. If the audit output is a slide deck without numbers, the build will be the same.
Engagement patterns
Anonymised examples of the shape financial systems engagements typically take.
Operational platform with embedded finance for a professional services group
An Australian professional services group running several businesses under one structure did not have a single place to operate from. Finance work was scattered across spreadsheets, shared inboxes, and tools that did not talk to each other. Every month-end was a manual reconciliation exercise across five tools.
We built the platform that holds it together, including the finance layer. It runs the compliance work, the projects, the custom calculators each business uses, the documents, the client portals, and the cross-entity ledger. Logins work across the group through Google Workspace and Microsoft. Each business has its own data and configuration. Finance reporting consolidates automatically. All hosted in Australia.
Month-end close dropped from weeks to days. Workflows that used to live in five places now live in one. The group is moving more of its operations onto the platform across every business it runs.
Custom invoicing platform for a usage-based AU SaaS business
An Australian software company billing customers on a complex usage-based pricing model could not represent the billing rules in any off-the-shelf platform. Manual invoice generation was consuming finance team hours every week, with errors that were caught downstream by support tickets.
We built a custom invoicing platform: usage data flows in from the product, billing rules apply automatically, invoices are generated and sent through Xero, customer portal lets clients self-serve their billing history. Multi-currency, multi-jurisdiction. Manual invoice generation collapsed to under thirty minutes per month. Billing errors reduced to negligible.
Reconciliation and management reporting for a mid-market operator
A mid-market Australian operator running revenue through multiple payment processors, an accounting platform, and a separate billing system spent a week each month reconciling across the three. We built a daily three-way reconciliation system with automated anomaly detection and a management reporting dashboard. Reconciliation runs daily. Anomalies surface within twenty-four hours rather than at month-end. Month-end close is now a review exercise, not a reconstruction exercise.
Common stack and integrations
We pick the stack that fits the problem. Default toolkit for financial systems:
- Accounting platforms. Xero, MYOB, NetSuite, QuickBooks. We integrate against the API, never via screen-scraping.
- Payment and billing. Stripe, PayPal, eWAY, Adyen, GoCardless, direct bank integration where required.
- Banking and feeds. Open Banking via consented data providers, direct ABA / EFT integration for Australian banks.
- Payroll. Xero Payroll, MYOB Payroll, Employment Hero, KeyPay. PAYG, super, payroll tax handled automatically.
- Compliance. AUSTRAC reporting, BAS, IAS, FBT documentation. Audit trail built into the data layer.
- Languages and infrastructure. TypeScript and Python by default. Postgres for the ledger. AWS / Azure / GCP AU-region hosting. Decimal arithmetic everywhere money is touched.
- Reporting. Custom dashboards over the live data, plus integration with Power BI, Tableau, or Looker if you already operate one of those.
Compliance and audit
Finance systems live or die by audit defensibility. Compliance is not bolted on at the end. Designed in from day one:
- ATO and BAS. Tax codes, GST handling, BAS auto-generation from underlying data. Aligned with Australian Taxation Office requirements.
- AUSTRAC. Where the system handles financial transactions that fall under AUSTRAC reporting obligations, AML / KYC workflows and reporting templates are built in.
- Payroll, super, payroll tax. PAYG, superannuation contributions, state-by-state payroll tax. Integrated with payroll platforms or built directly.
- Audit trail. Every transaction, every approval, every change to a record is logged with who, when, and why. Immutable history queryable on demand.
- Approval workflows. Multi-level approvals with delegation rules and segregation of duties. Defensible to an external auditor.
- Data residency. AU-region infrastructure by default. On-premise deployments supported for workloads with strict data sovereignty requirements.
- Financial-services obligations. Where the client operates under AFSL, AFCA, or ASIC oversight, the system is designed with those frameworks in mind. We work alongside compliance officers and external auditors.
How we structure engagements
Every engagement is scoped to the specific work. We do not publish fixed pricing because every business is different. Cost ranges and timelines are agreed up front in the scope document, before any build starts. Four common structures:
- Fixed-scope project. Defined deliverable, defined timeline, defined acceptance criteria. Useful when you know exactly what you want built.
- Monthly retainer. Senior engineering capacity, embedded technical lead, ongoing iteration. Useful when you have an evolving roadmap.
- Fractional engagement. Senior advisory and oversight, delivery handled by your team or a separate vendor. Useful when you have engineering capacity but need finance-systems seniority.
- One-off audit or strategy work. Useful before you commit to a build path. The audit output is yours regardless.
Most mid-market engagements sit in a range that the R&D Tax Incentive can offset a meaningful portion of. Reach out and we will reply within 24 hours with the shape and pricing that fits your situation.
R&D Tax Incentive
Novel financial systems work, particularly custom billing engines, integration middleware, AI-augmented reconciliation, and AUSTRAC compliance automation, typically qualifies as eligible R&D activity under the Australian 43.5% R&D Tax Incentive, jointly administered by AusIndustry and the Australian Taxation Office. For Australian mid-market operators this often funds a meaningful portion of the engagement. We document sprints properly so your tax specialist can file with confidence. We hand over the readiness pack. We do not lodge the claim. See our guide to the R&D Tax Incentive for AI in Australia for the detail.
Common questions
Do you replace our existing accounting platform?
Almost never. Xero, MYOB, NetSuite and similar tools are good at being the ledger. We build the systems around them that handle the parts that do not fit cleanly: custom billing, reconciliation, multi-entity consolidation, custom approval flows, management reporting. The accounting platform stays where it works.
Can you handle multi-entity, multi-currency, multi-jurisdiction?
Yes. Group structures with intercompany eliminations, FX revaluation, multi-jurisdiction compliance, and consolidated management reporting are bread-and-butter work. Common for professional services groups, holding companies, and businesses operating across AU, NZ, and offshore entities.
How long does a financial systems engagement take?
Audits run one to two weeks. Proof of concept typically four to six weeks. Full builds vary by scope but most ship in eight to sixteen weeks from audit to production. Parallel-run against the existing system before cutover is standard. Ongoing iteration runs as a monthly retainer once the system is live.
How do you handle AUSTRAC, BAS, and payroll compliance?
Designed in from day one. Tax codes, GST handling, BAS auto-generation, AUSTRAC reporting where applicable, payroll tax across states, super, PAYG. We work alongside your tax advisor and external auditor so the system fits the compliance work they do, not the other way around.
Can we audit-trail every change for ASIC, AFSL, or external audit?
Yes. Every transaction, every approval, every change to a record is logged with who, when, and why. Immutable audit trail queryable on demand. Designed to be defensible to external auditors and regulators. Common for businesses operating under AFSL or ASIC oversight.
Can you migrate us off a legacy finance platform?
Yes. We have moved clients off bespoke legacy systems, off ill-fitting SaaS implementations, and off spreadsheet-driven processes. Migration plans always include parallel-run and rollback paths. Data integrity is the priority; speed of cutover is secondary.
Do you build on-premise or hybrid?
Yes. AU-region cloud (AWS Sydney, Azure Australia East, GCP Australia Southeast) is the default. On-premise and hybrid deployments supported for workloads with strict data sovereignty or regulatory requirements. Common for financial services and government clients.
What happens after the system is live?
You own it. Source code, infrastructure, documentation, training. Most clients continue on a monthly support retainer for ongoing iteration, period-end support, and new features as the business evolves. Some operate fully independently after handover. Both are fine.