Accountants who know the agency business.
Commission flows, rent rolls, trust-account boundaries and sales-team payroll: agency books are their own discipline. Chartered Accountants who benchmark your agency against the industry and keep every number board-ready.
Rated 4.9 from 510+ Google reviews · Chartered Accountants · Xero Platinum Partner
A full finance function, one fixed fee.
- Benchmarking against real agency industry data
- Industry best-practice processes
- Regular board meetings
- Day-to-day transaction accounting in Xero
- Accounts payable processing
- Payroll processing
- BAS and IAS lodgment
- Payroll tax and superannuation processing
- Annual budgeting and goal setting
- Continuous support from your management accountant
- Structuring and asset protection
- Tax strategy and optimisation
- Cash flow forecasting
- End-of-year tax compliance for your business and your family
- Regular catchups with your dedicated client advisor
- Best-practice advice and recommendations
Wherever your agency is, we meet it there.
Starting an agency? We build the structure that protects your assets and puts more profit in your pocket, with best-practice processes from day one. Established? Your relationship with your accountant is the foundation - expect proactive advice, absolute oversight of your numbers, and decision-making that is always on point.
What this looks like in practice.
An independent agency, two offices, roughly 640 managements and a six-agent sales team.
Case study · Real estate agencyA rent roll worth more than the agency knew, reported as one blur.Sales and property management separated, and the rent roll valued as the asset it is. See what changed
The background
A well-run suburban agency with a principal who had built the rent roll over eleven years and had a genuine offer to buy part of it. Sales were strong, the trust account had never had an audit issue, and the business was profitable on any measure the principal looked at.
The challenge
The problem was that there was only one measure. Sales commission and property management fees landed in the same profit and loss, so the two businesses inside the business were indistinguishable. The rent roll - the durable, recurring, saleable asset - was being carried by a good sales year, and nobody could say whether it stood up on its own. When the offer arrived, valued as a multiple of annualised management income, the principal could not produce a clean management-income figure to argue from. Separately, the trust account was reconciled properly but the operating entity drew from it on a rhythm nobody had documented, which is the kind of thing that is fine until somebody asks.
The approach
Two things had to happen before the offer could be answered: the rent roll had to have its own profit and loss, and the boundary between trust money and agency money had to be written down rather than remembered. Neither is exotic work. Both had been deferred because the business was doing well enough not to force the issue.
How the work ran
Weeks 1–4
Split the two businesses in the ledger
The chart of accounts was rebuilt with property management and sales as separate reporting segments, carrying their own revenue, their own direct wages and a defensible allocation of premises and administration. Management income was restated for the prior twenty-four months on the same basis, so the trend was visible rather than asserted.
Weeks 5–8
Document the trust boundary
The commission-withdrawal process was mapped, timed and written into a one-page procedure with a named person and a frequency. Nothing about the handling changed - what changed is that it could now be explained to an auditor, a buyer or a new bookkeeper without relying on the principal's memory.
Weeks 9–12
Put a number on the asset
With clean management income, the rent roll could be looked at the way a buyer looks at it: annualised management fees, average fee per management, arrears and vacancy, and the churn rate that determines whether the multiple holds. Two fee tiers had drifted below the office average and were repriced at renewal.
What changed
- Rent roll reporting
- merged with salesstandalone P&L
- Management income visibility
- annual guessmonthly, 24-month trend
- Average management fee
- below office average on two tiersrepriced at renewal
- Trust withdrawal process
- undocumentedwritten, named, scheduled
- Position on the offer
- no basis to negotiatevalued from real numbers
Most agency principals know roughly what their rent roll is worth. Roughly is fine until somebody makes an offer, a bank asks, or a partner leaves - and then the difference between roughly and precisely is the negotiation.
A worked example, built from the pattern these engagements follow in real estate agency. The business is composite and unnamed; the mechanics, the sequence and the order of work are the ones we use. Talk to us about your own numbers.
Frequently asked questions.
Do you work with agencies of any brand?
Yes - independents and every franchise group. The tax, structuring, payroll and rent-roll issues are the same across brands, and so is the value of benchmarking your numbers against agencies that look like yours.
What about our trust account?
Your trust account stays where the Property Occupations Act puts it - in your trust accounting software, audited on its own rules. What we keep is everything around it: the general account, the transfers reconciled against it, and books that don't blur the boundary.
Can you help with buying or selling a rent roll?
Yes - rent roll transactions have specific valuation, contract and tax treatment questions, and the structure you hold the roll in matters enormously. Talk to us before you sign anything.
How do agencies usually engage you?
Most take the full package - transaction accounting, payroll, BAS, board reporting and tax - on a fixed monthly fee, so the whole finance function is one predictable number.
Epic accounting, happy agencies.
See what benchmarked, board-level accounting does for an agency.
Or call 07 3899 8311.