A portfolio that grew, and a finance team didn’t have to.

How Place HQ centralised accounting for its growing network of Brisbane real estate offices, cut accounting software costs by an estimated 30% and got about a week back every month, without adding headcount.

The business

Place HQ is the centralised services team behind a portfolio of Place real estate offices around Brisbane, handling accounting, HR and legal for each office so directors can focus on the business of selling. Finance business partners, Naaman Narayan and Ben Cao manage monthly reporting, budgets and quarterly board meetings across 28 offices and counting.

The challenge

Under their previous solution, each office in the portfolio ran its own file with its own login, which made it hard to manage access and get a consolidated view as the business grew. "If somebody asked me to go in and give someone access to every single tenant, I'd walk out the door," Naaman says of the complexity that came with the old set-up. Reconciling the balance sheet for a single office was also a full day's work under that system, and with a growing number of offices to get through, Naaman and his team wondered whether the system would hold up as Place HQ’s portfolio kept expanding.

The switch

Place HQ moved its offices onto Xero, drawn by Xero's ability to manage the whole portfolio like a single practice. “It allows us to treat HQ as this centralised service, almost like a public practice, looking after hundreds of clients,” Ben says. Staff who once needed separate logins for every office now get access in one place.

From there, the wins added up. A custom link between Xero and Excel turned management balance sheet reconciliations from a full day's work into what Naaman calls “a straight-up refresh, a 5-second job.” Recurring invoices and journals now run themselves for rent collection and monthly prepayments with minimal supervision. And when something's coded wrong, it gets fixed quickly with find and recode, instead of forcing a reversal and repost. “It's a game changer for us,” Naaman says.

The result

In the 12 months since making the switch, Place HQ has grown its portfolio from 18 offices to 28, without a matching increase in headcount. Naaman estimates that accounting software costs are down about 30% a month. And the time saved, which Naaman estimates is roughly a week every month, has gone straight back into higher-value work. “That extra time has let us do what we're actually here for,” Naaman says, “helping directors understand their numbers, not just report them.”

The support has made the difference too. “[Our Xero Account Managers] have been with us this entire journey, always checking in,” Naaman says. “If I log a ticket, I get a response that night and the issue's solved by morning.”