By the Time Your Accountant Calls, the Damage Is Already Done
It's a Tuesday afternoon in late October. Mia, who runs a twelve-person digital agency in Brisbane, is sitting across from her accountant at a quarterly review. The numbers are on the screen. One of her biggest projects for the year — a full brand overhaul for a retail client — came in at a $14,000 loss.
She stares at the figure. The project wrapped up six weeks ago. The client was happy. The team celebrated. She sent a thank-you card.
And she lost fourteen thousand dollars on it.
"How did this happen?" she asks.
Her accountant points to scope creep, extra revision rounds, and a contractor invoice that came in late. All true. All completely unfixable now.
This is the most common financial story in small business. Not fraud. Not incompetence. Just a lag — between reality and awareness — that makes course correction impossible.
The Lag Is the Problem
Most business owners understand their finances in arrears. The month closes, the bookkeeper reconciles, the accountant reviews, and then — somewhere between two and six weeks later — you find out how you actually did.
For a business running three or four projects at a time, that lag means you might be halfway through your next project before you know the last one was a disaster. If the same structural problem exists (underquoting, scope creep, untracked contractor hours), you're repeating the mistake in real time while reviewing the last one on paper.
A 2023 survey by MYOB found that 61% of Australian SME owners said they rely primarily on their accountant or bookkeeper for financial performance insight. Only 22% said they reviewed project-level profitability during a project rather than after. The other 78% are flying on instruments that only update once a month.
This isn't a criticism of accountants. A good accountant is invaluable — for tax strategy, compliance, financial planning, and reading the longer arc of a business. But accountants work with historical data by definition. They tell you what happened. The question of what's *happening right now* is a different tool entirely.
What Real-Time Actually Means
The phrase "real-time financial data" gets thrown around a lot, so it's worth being specific about what it means in practice — and what it doesn't.
It doesn't mean your accountant is watching your bank account live. It means that when a team member logs four hours on a project, that cost appears in the project's running total immediately. When you approve a supplier invoice, the project margin updates. When a client pays, the revenue figure changes. At any point, you can open a project and see: what did we quote, what have we spent, what do we still have to deliver, and are we still going to make money?
That's the shift. From a monthly report to a live dashboard. From finding out to knowing.
For a service business — an agency, a consultancy, an engineering firm, a physio practice managing multiple programs — this changes the decisions you can make.
The Story of a Project That Didn't Have to Lose Money
Let me give you a different version of Mia's story. Same agency, same project, different infrastructure.
It's week four of the eight-week brand project. The project manager, Jake, opens the project dashboard on a Monday morning. The project was quoted at $42,000. They've spent $24,000 in staff time so far, plus $3,800 in contractor costs. That's $27,800 against a project that's roughly 50% complete by timeline — but only 40% complete by deliverables.
The numbers don't lie. They're tracking to spend about $56,000 to deliver a $42,000 project.
Jake flags it that morning. Mia looks at the data. They trace it back: the client has been requesting extra rounds of feedback, and the team has been accommodating without flagging it as scope. Four extra meetings. Three additional concept directions that weren't in the brief.
None of this is malicious. It's just drift — the natural tendency of a project to expand when no one is watching the cost in real time.
But here's the thing: they caught it in week four. Not week nine. Not at the quarterly review.
Mia has a conversation with the client. She explains that the project has moved beyond the original scope, presents a clear summary of what's been added, and offers two options: a scope amendment with a revised fee, or a reset to the original brief. The client, who genuinely didn't realise how much extra work they'd been requesting, chooses the amendment. An additional $8,500 is agreed.
The project closes at a small profit instead of a $14,000 loss. The client relationship is intact — better, actually, because the conversation was professional and based on documented facts rather than a vague complaint about "things getting complicated."
The only difference between these two versions of the story is when Mia saw the data.
Why Most Businesses Don't Have This
If real-time project financials are this useful, why don't more businesses have them?
The honest answer is that building it from scratch is painful. You need your time tracking to talk to your project management system, which needs to talk to your accounting software, which needs to pull in contractor invoices, which needs to map back to individual projects. Most businesses use four or five separate tools for these functions — and those tools don't naturally share data.
You can build integrations. Zapier, Make, and similar middleware tools can connect systems. But integrations break. They sync on a delay. They require maintenance. And critically, they're only as good as the data going in — if someone logs time in one system and invoices come through another, there's always a reconciliation problem lurking somewhere.
The deeper issue is that when your business data lives in five different places, you spend a surprising amount of time just assembling the picture. That's admin work. And admin work is the part of running a business that, left unchecked, starts eating the parts that actually matter — the craft of your work and the business development that brings in new clients.
There's a pattern that shows up in businesses that have grown past the "one person and a spreadsheet" stage but haven't yet built proper systems. Admin starts at a manageable 20% of the owner's time. Then it creeps to 35%. Then 50%. At that point, the quality of the actual work starts to slip, and business development — the conversations, proposals, and relationship-building that bring in new revenue — stops happening. Revenue softens. The pressure increases. More time goes to chasing invoices and reconciling data. The spiral tightens.
Real-time financial visibility isn't just a reporting feature. It's a way of keeping admin from becoming the whole job.
How the Xero Integration Changes the Equation
Xero is the accounting platform most Australian SMEs are already using. It handles invoicing, bank reconciliation, payroll, and tax reporting. It's excellent at what it does.
What it doesn't do natively is give you project-level profitability in real time, connected to timesheets and team activity.
When Opus connects to Xero with a two-way sync, the data flows in both directions. Invoices raised in Opus appear in Xero. Expenses reconciled in Xero map back to projects in Opus. Bank feeds update both systems. Your accountant keeps working in Xero exactly as they always have — nothing changes for them. But you now have a live view of every project's financial position, because the same underlying data is powering both systems.
This matters because it means you don't have to choose between your accountant's tools and your own operational visibility. You're not running a parallel system that creates reconciliation headaches. You're just seeing the same data from a different angle — the angle that's useful for making decisions today, not reporting on decisions made last month.
For businesses that track time — agencies, consultancies, law firms, IT support providers, trades businesses, anyone billing by the hour or managing labour costs — the timesheet integration is where the real value sits. Hours logged by your team feed directly into the project's cost calculation. You see labour cost accumulating in real time. If a project is burning hours faster than expected, you see it before it becomes a problem you can only describe in hindsight.
What You Can Actually Do With This Information
Real-time data is only useful if it changes behaviour. So what does it actually let you do?
Catch scope creep early. When you can see that a project is 60% through its budget but only 40% through its deliverables, you have a fact-based conversation to have with your client. Not a complaint. A documented, professional discussion.
Price future work more accurately. Over time, your historical project data tells you which types of work you consistently underprice. Not because your accountant ran an annual analysis, but because you can see it project by project as it happens. Your next quote for a similar job is better because you know what the last one actually cost.
Make resourcing decisions faster. If a project is tracking ahead of budget, you might be able to pull a team member off early and redeploy them. If it's tracking behind, you know before the deadline crunch, not during it.
Have better conversations with your accountant. When you walk into your quarterly review already knowing your project-level performance, the conversation shifts from "here's what happened" to "here's what I'm planning based on what I already know." Your accountant can do more useful work because you're not starting from scratch.
Reduce the end-of-month panic. When data is current, month-end is just another day. You're not scrambling to reconcile six weeks of transactions or chasing team members for timesheets from three weeks ago.
A Note for Businesses That Don't Run Projects
Everything above is framed around project-based businesses, because that's where the margin erosion story is most vivid. But the principle applies to any business where costs and revenue need to be tracked against specific activities.
A retail business tracking margin by product line. A subscription business tracking customer acquisition cost against lifetime value. A property management business tracking maintenance costs against rental income per property. A training provider tracking delivery costs per course cohort.
The question is always the same: are you finding out what happened, or do you know what's happening? The former is useful for reporting. The latter is useful for running a business.
The Shift Worth Making
Mia — the real Mia, the one who found out about the $14,000 loss at a quarterly review — eventually rebuilt her financial systems. It took her about three months to get clean data flowing. She said the hardest part wasn't the technology. It was the habit change: actually looking at the numbers weekly instead of waiting for someone else to tell her.
"I used to think finance was my accountant's job," she said. "Now I think finance is my job, and my accountant helps me think about it properly."
That's the shift. Not replacing your accountant. Not becoming a CFO. Just moving from passenger to driver — seeing the road as you travel it, not in a photograph taken six weeks ago.
If you're curious about how Opus connects with Xero to give you live project financials, the [features page](https://opus.net.au/features) walks through how the integration works. There's also a free tier if you want to see how your own data looks before committing to anything.