Your Kitchen Ltd (Mastercraft Kitchens Wellington)

The situation.

Mastercraft Kitchens Wellington (operated by Your Kitchen Limited) is the largest custom-built kitchen manufacturer in the Wellington region. Twenty years in business, 23 employees, manufacturing and installation across the lower North Island.

Sue Hawes runs the office. Bookkeeping and accounting in a business this size are not a side task – they are the operating layer. And Sue had a problem: the accounting service Your Kitchen had been using was slow, poorly supported online, and the wrong fit for the business it now was. The cost of staying was bleeding visibility and time. The cost of switching looked daunting from inside the function.

That is the migration trap. Businesses run on the wrong system for years because the conversion looks worse than the status quo. It rarely is.

What we changed.

Admin Army ran the conversion from the existing service to Xero as a structured migration:

• Xero set up, including organisation, financial details, GST period
• General ledger import
• Contact import
• Bank accounts and bank feeds configured
• Xero invoice template configuration
• Conversion balances loaded
• Fixed asset register set up
• Xero training session for the in-house team

The structural change was that the operating layer of a 23-person manufacturing business moved cleanly to the right platform, on a managed timeline, with Sue able to run the office through it.

Beyond the migration, ongoing bookkeeping support was kept in place – including coverage for Sue's leave, which is the standard continuity gap in a single-finance-seat operation.

The outcome.

The system migration that Sue had been deferring happened without disrupting the office. Hubdoc came in alongside Xero to clean up the document flow. The day-to-day finance work runs to a predictable schedule.

The leave-coverage problem that any single-seat office function carries is now resolved by the engagement itself. Sue can take time off without the books going dark.

In Sue’s words.

"I thought the process would take longer than it did. I was amazed by how easily it happened. I did nothing – it was like magic at the other end of the computer."

"Having Admin Army on board as a backup means if I want to take time off, your service will provide business continuity as you can take care of things while I'm away."