Our Story

Our Living Business team was formed in 2015 by Helen Schafer with the support of her husband, Gerard Prendergast. Since day dot, our vision has been to use a holistic approach to help business owners optimise their Xero based financial systems.

Since then, our team has grown into a group of highly experienced bookkeepers and Xero app experts, all living and and working in NZ. Our mission remains to help small businesses succeed, and still drives everything we do.

Whether you’re looking for help with day to day booking and payroll, or assistance to set up efficient systems, we can help. We’d love to chat with you about your business goals and the systems we can create to get you there.

Our Principles

We enjoy our work

• We believe we should enjoy our work, and our clients should enjoy working with us. 
• Our team each have different specialities and strengths as well as limits on availability and how we like to work, so to maximise happiness all our clients are individually matched with their Living Business team member.
• We only work with clients who we like and get along with.  Life’s too short!
• We encourage, support and trust strong individual working relationships between our team and our clients. 

We support each other 

• We believe our whole lives are important and what is remembered, not just work.  
• We are flexible and accommodate working arrangements for work life balance.  Some of us like regular work times around family and are not available outside these days and times, others of us are happy to be available on a more ad hoc basis including sometimes afterhours.  
• Sometimes events happen in life that are more important than work.  It’s in those times we can show who we really are by being supportive and doing what we can to help.  As a team that can mean backing each other up to temporarily help with workload, and for Helen it means being willing to do whatever possible through challenging times – both for the Living Business team and for our clients. 
• We operate a buddy system for backup, and include peer review within our process.

We do what's right

• We believe in doing what’s right, even when it may not make business sense for ourselves.
• We will bring to our clients’ attention any opportunities we see to improve process and reduce the cost of our own service. 
• We know our limits and will re-direct clients if we know a better match is likely elsewhere.  Helen has a strong referral network built up in related industries which she is happy to use.  Most often this is in the areas of HR, other Xero Apps we don’t specialise in, and Website and Web app development.
• We take responsibility for our mistakes. We cannot guarantee mistakes will not be made – we are all human - but we can guarantee we will  take responsibility.

Meet Our Founder - Helen Schafer

Helen created Living Business with the vision of helping businesses thrive.

Before starting Living Business, Helen successfully built and scaled her own property management business. Through this experience Helen discovered her strength in facilitating processes and systems to enable robust business financial data.

Helen has a knack for finding great people, drawing out talent, and providing supporting for everyone to enjoy working in the areas they’re best at. That’s a big reason why the team has stayed with Living Business for so long, and why we’re now starting to grow the team again. Building a team who enjoy what they do and do it well has always been the motivation.

Helen is a qualified bookkeeper, but that’s not where she adds the most value. Helen is really good at is listening and understanding where a business is at, and then working out what support will genuinely make a difference. Sometimes that’s bookkeeping. Sometimes it’s implementing new software, improving how existing systems are being used, or helping tidy things up behind the scenes. And sometimes, after a conversation, it becomes clear that a different solution is needed — in those cases, she is always happy to point people in the right direction.

What Helen enjoys most is seeing business owners get their time back, and gain clearer and more reliable information to feel confident making better decisions in their business. Their accountants are usually pretty happy too — accurate, dependable data makes everyone’s job easier.

Helen lives in and works from Papamoa Beach in the beautiful Bay of Plenty, NZ.

Helen’s credentials:

• Certified Accredited Platinum Partner for Xero New Zealand
• NZ Certified Bookkeeper (NZ Bookkeepers Association)
• WorkflowMAX Gold Implementation Partner (2026)
• NZ Diploma in Accounting (2016)