Reckon to Xero conversion and migration for businesses in Perth, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, whether you run Reckon Accounts Hosted, Reckon Accounts Desktop or Reckon One. We read the Reckon company file directly, turn customer jobs into Xero tracking, and carry payroll across with leave balances checked by the person who runs your pay.
Built here. Your data stays here.
Reckon and Xero agree on the basics and differ on the detail. These are the differences that shape the move.
How Reckon holds it today.
How the same data sits in Xero.
What actually comes across
Moving the balances is the easy part. The work is the history: the invoices still open, the codes that do not exist in Xero, the attachments nobody wants to lose, and the customer records that have drifted over years. All of it has to arrive reconciled, not approximately.
What has to move
Codes mapped to their Xero equivalents, records deduplicated on rules you approve, then both systems run side by side until the balances agree. Cutover happens on a window you choose.
Talk to us about your conversionWhat you get
Leaving Reckon for Xero is a different job depending on which Reckon you run. These are the parts that need the most care.
Reckon Accounts Hosted and Reckon Accounts Desktop keep everything in a company file that we read directly. That is how we took seven years of history out of Reckon Accounts Enterprise for a Perth professional services firm.
Reckon One is a cloud product built from separate modules for invoices, bills, projects and payroll. Each module you use is taken out on its own and matched back together before anything goes near Xero.
Reckon Accounts can hold jobs underneath a customer, so one client may have a dozen jobs, each with its own invoices. Xero has no jobs inside a contact.
Each Reckon job becomes an option in a Xero tracking category, and every invoice still goes to the parent customer. You keep job profit reports without cluttering the contact list with a contact for every job.
Reckon separates customers, suppliers, employees and other names. Xero keeps one contact list, and each contact number there can be used only once, so overlapping numbers are fixed on the way in.
Old customers you no longer deal with still have history. They load as active first so their past invoices can attach, and are archived once the history is in.
Reckon payroll items, leave accruals and super funds become Xero earnings rates, leave types and super memberships. Salary sacrifice and novated lease payments need their own deduction types in Xero, and we set those up before any employee loads.
Long service leave that goes back many years is checked one person at a time with whoever runs your payroll. On our Reckon Accounts Enterprise project that check caught two long service leave figures before they reached Xero.
Some Reckon Accounts Hosted users bring bank transactions in through a separate feed service. In Xero, the feeds connect directly from your conversion date.
Reconciled history comes across as reconciled, and the new feeds pick up from the day after, so there is no month where a transaction appears twice.
Time tracking tools that raise invoices, a CRM that creates new clients, expense apps that post bills: anything that pushed data into Reckon has to be pointed at Xero before cutover.
On the professional services project we rebuilt five of those connections on Xero, including a time entry to draft invoice link that runs three times a day, and tested each one with real data before go-live.
A Reckon to Xero price depends on which Reckon you run, how many years of history come across, how complex payroll is and how many apps need rebuilding.
We look at the Reckon file or Reckon One account, the payroll setup and the apps that feed it, then put a number on the move.
Payroll setup, the data load, two practice runs, the report checks and the cutover are covered by one price agreed before we begin.
Rebuilding connected apps or adding dashboards on Xero can be priced as a separate stage with its own sign-off.
Why HELLO PEOPLE
DIY spreadsheet migrations, vendor migration tools, and offshore migrators all promise to move your data. Here's how HELLO PEOPLE compares on the things that actually matter to an AU SMB owner.
| Concern | HELLO PEOPLE | DIY spreadsheets | Vendor migration tool | Offshore migrators |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Data preserved end-to-end | 100% + validated at every step | Usually yes, no validation | Advertised complete, some fields drop | Depends on the vendor |
| Downtime during cutover | Zero. Parallel run + weekend cut | Days to weeks | Hours to days | Often days |
| AU BAS / GST / payroll fit | AU-native, understood | You own the risk | Usually generic | Variable |
| Pricing model | Fixed price, one-time | Your team's time forever | Per-record or flat fee | Per-hour + revisions |
| When something breaks | We own the fix, no charge | You own it | Support ticket queue | Time-zone gap |
| Data cleansing | Included in scope | Optional, often skipped | Usually not | Quoted separately |
| Post-cutover support | 30 days included, plan optional | None | Chat support tier | Depends on contract |
A Perth management consulting firm had run Reckon Accounts Enterprise for seven years, with fortnightly payroll for 28 staff and five apps feeding Reckon. We moved all seven years of history, rebuilt the five connections on Xero and ran the first payroll in Xero on day three, with no payroll errors in the first three cycles.
Read the full case studyWe had put off the Reckon migration for two years because of the payroll. Three of our senior staff have long service leave calculations that go back a long way, and we could not afford to get those wrong. HELLO PEOPLE mapped every leave balance, had our HR manager validate each one before going anywhere near production, and delivered the first payroll in Xero without a single error. That built trust in the whole project.
A structured process so you know what is happening at each stage. No ambiguity, no surprises.
We open your Reckon file or Reckon One account, confirm how much history there is, list every app that feeds it and document your payroll setup. Scope and price are fixed from that review.
Pay items, leave types, deductions and salary sacrifice are set up in Xero Payroll before any data moves, and confirmed with your payroll person.
Accounts, tax rates, tracking categories for your Reckon jobs and classes, and user access are set up, with the conversion date on the first day of your starting month.
We run the full conversion into a test Xero organisation at least twice. Your finance lead checks the balances and your payroll lead checks every employee before the real load.
Contacts, open invoices and bills, balances, history and payroll load into your live Xero organisation. Reports are read back and compared with Reckon on the same date.
We stay close for the first pay run and the first Business Activity Statement in Xero. The Reckon file is kept read-only for lookups.
The price is fixed after we have looked at your Reckon setup. It moves with the product you run (Reckon Accounts Hosted, Reckon Accounts Desktop, Reckon One or Reckon Elite), the years of history you want, payroll, and how many apps need reconnecting.
About 2 to 4 weeks for most Australian businesses. Reckon One conversions usually finish in 2 to 3 weeks. Reckon Accounts Hosted with long history and payroll sits at the longer end, and a project that also rebuilds several integrations and dashboards takes longer again: our Reckon Accounts Enterprise project ran 11 weeks from start to go-live.
Yes. We moved seven years of Reckon Accounts Enterprise history into Xero on one project, all searchable from day one. You can also choose fewer years in full detail and keep the rest in the read-only Reckon file.
Xero has no jobs inside a contact, so each Reckon job becomes an option in a Xero tracking category. Invoices still go to the parent customer, and you can still report profit by job.
Yes. Reckon stays live until cutover. Both systems run side by side for the final two weeks so no invoice or bill is missed.
Yes. Pay rates, leave balances, year-to-date figures, super funds and Single Touch Payroll Phase 2 reporting move to Xero Payroll and are checked. The switch is timed to your pay cycle so no pay run is disrupted.
Yes. We are based in Perth and run Reckon to Xero conversions for businesses anywhere in Australia. The work is done remotely from start to finish.
Where people go after Reckon varies, and we scope the move to whichever system you have chosen: Xero, MYOB AccountRight, MYOB Business, MYOB Acumatica, QuickBooks Online, Reckon, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, Sage 50, Sage 300, Sage Intacct, Odoo, Zoho Books, FreshBooks, Saasu, SAP Business One, Oracle and Workday. If the one you have picked is a poor fit for how you actually work, we will say so before you have paid for a conversion into it.
The parts that decide the timeline are the same wherever you land: the chart of accounts, the general ledger, the customer and supplier master, open purchase orders and sales orders, opening balances and payroll history, and how much history you export out of the old system and import into the new one, rather than leave behind in a readable archive. Hosted files, local files and vendor exports each come out differently.
If you are looking because Reckon is too old, out of support or reaching end of life, that is a question of timing rather than whether. It is worth comparing the alternatives and moving away on your own schedule rather than on the one the vendor picks for you.
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Tell us which Reckon product you run, how many years of history you want in Xero, how many people are on payroll and which apps feed Reckon today. We reply with a plan for the conversion and a fixed price.
Prefer a quick chat? Call 0425 531 127. We answer the phone in Perth.
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