Andrea Handley
Handley Business Solutions
Handley Business Solutions is a bookkeeping practice based in Australia, led by director Andrea Handley. The firm runs a team of five, including one offshore staff member and three onshore colleagues who share a single office. Handley Business Solutions specialises in BAS agent services and payroll, working with a broad range of clients who come almost entirely through referrals from current clients and accountants.
About two years ago, Andrea knew she had hit the ceiling of what she could carry alone. She was a sole practitioner and everything, every client's needs, every task sequence, every individual nuance, lived entirely in her head. She wanted to grow the firm rather than stay solo, which meant bringing on staff at different skill levels and outsourcing some work offshore. None of that was possible without a system that could transfer what she knew into something the whole team could follow.
She spent considerable time evaluating other practice management solutions before landing on XBert. Most of them required building a separate task for every client variation, which meant inconsistencies across the same task type and a maintenance problem every time something like Payday Super requirements changed. XBert let her build a standard process once, apply it across clients on different schedules, and layer in client-specific detail through notes, without duplicating and maintaining separate task versions for every client.
You've got to be in so much pain that you're willing to change. Get away from an Excel spreadsheet.
Everything Andrea knew about her clients had no documented home. She knew which client needed what, in which order, and with which particular instructions. A new team member had none of that context, and there was no way to give it to them reliably. Clients had built a relationship with Andrea's standard of service and expected that same consistency regardless of who was doing the work. Without a system, the knowledge stayed stuck with her.
Other solutions she evaluated compounded the problem rather than solving it. Building a separate task for each client variation meant that when a process changed, every individual version had to be updated. The inconsistencies that crept in across the same task type were exactly the kind of quality risk she was trying to eliminate.
Bringing on staff at mixed skill levels added another layer. A trainee and a graduate accountant needed to see not just the step in front of them but what came next, so they understood the whole job even when they were only handling part of it. And with one team member offshore, handing work over cleanly was not optional. It had to work every time.
Andrea adopted XBert after spending significant time on alternatives that did not fit. Implementation was genuinely hard. She worked through it largely on her own across September and October, with support from the Fast Track onboarding programme and specialist help from Cassandra Scott on XPM linking and setup. The team went fully live in November.
The capability that made the difference was multi-schedule templates with smart notes. Andrea builds each recurring process once as a standard task, applies it across clients on the right schedule, and adds all client-specific instructions through notes attached to that task. When Payday Super requirements change, she updates the template once. Every client's version reflects it immediately, with no inconsistencies.
Smart notes now carry everything the team needs to know about a client. There is no shared drive, no separate client note document, no chasing Andrea for context. The instruction is in the task, visible to whoever is working on it, whether that is a graduate accountant, a trainee or an offshore team member.
For data quality, the team's approach is deliberate. Rather than treating alerts as a separate daily inbox, staff review all XBert alerts for a client during the full client session. When they are working on a client, they do the whole job and move on. Missing ABNs, missing GST and other BAS-related issues surface early, so the team can act quickly rather than discovering problems at lodgement.
I wouldn't say it saves us time, but what it does give us is confidence that we're not missing anything. Or we miss less, and that we know that things are done from start to finish properly.
The clearest proof of what a proper system makes possible arrived when Andrea entered a joint venture with a tax accountant and inherited a wave of new clients overnight. Her team onboarded approximately 90 clients in a single week. Before XBert, that would have been impossible.
The benefit that Andrea reaches for most readily is not a number. It is confidence. Work goes out the door knowing the steps were followed, the right order was kept, and nothing fell through. Her review time before work reaches a client has shortened because the task structure and alerts give her a starting point rather than a blank page.
When a team member had to fly overseas at short notice for a family emergency, the work did not stop. Another staff member picked up the file and continued without missing a beat. That kind of resilience is not possible when the process lives in one person's head.
There's no way we could have done this without XBert. It would have been impossible for us to onboard 90 clients in a week to suddenly do that without this sort of system in place, we just wouldn't have been able to do it.
Andrea's instinct about where the industry is heading is straightforward: the fewer places a team must look, the better. Jumping between tools is a time drain, and her preference is for more capability to sit inside the one system her team already works in every day.
She is open to going deeper with Custom XBerts as the feature has matured, particularly around building monitors tailored to what she wants to know about her specific client book. The XI Review feature for BAS readiness is the capability she is watching most closely. Having a structured record of who completed what and when sits directly in the path of her QMS documentation requirements, and she sees it as the missing piece in her current workflow audit trail.
If your practice is still held together by what you carry in your head, the ceiling is already close. Bringing on a trainee, a graduate, an offshore team member or anyone else requires a system that transfers knowledge, not just tasks. Handley Business Solutions moved from sole practitioner to a team of five serving a growing client book, and the foundation was process that any team member can follow without asking Andrea first.
If you are at the point where you know growth requires something to change, that is the right moment to start.
If you are looking for business solutions that focus on quality data, talk to Andrea today.
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