How a New Zealand heating products business went from untrustworthy stock numbers to monthly management accounts they can act on.
The problem
Our client sells transportable heating products, many supplied as kits built from multiple components. Their stock ran in Unleashed and their accounts in Xero. By May 2025 the two were telling different stories.
Sales orders weren't completing properly, so stock levels drifted. Bills of materials for their kits and assemblies had grown complicated. The stock value in Xero couldn't be trusted — which meant cost of goods sold couldn't be trusted, and neither could the margins.
They were also buying from an overseas supplier in US dollars, holding prepayments in New Zealand dollars, and trying to connect a Shopify store and courier system. A small team was working hard without a clear view of what they were actually making.
The issue wasn't Unleashed but rather the original set up completed without sufficient knowledge of how the business actually worked as well as insufficient knowledge of the Unleashed product.
What changed
We started with the structure. Before touching the numbers, we rebuilt the foundations: how products, kits and bills of materials were set up, and how orders moved through Unleashed, so the system matched how the business really operates. Getting this structure right is the single biggest factor in whether an Unleashed implementation succeeds.
We reset rather than patched. After working through the issues with the team, we recommended a clean stock reset in June 2025. Incomplete sales orders were cleared, stock was revalued at the correct cost, and a fresh stocktake went in. Xero's inventory was then rebalanced to match.
We connected the pieces. Shopify and the courier were linked in. Warehouse locations and minimum and maximum stock levels were set up in Unleashed, along with a process for warranties and international customers.
We straightened out the numbers. We set up a foreign exchange procedure and converted the supplier prepayments into US dollars so they matched the bills. Then the cost of goods sold as spread out across the previous eleven months in line with sales, so every month shows its true margin — and recalibrated it when a late purchase order arrived.
We built reporting they could use. A custom profit and loss, stock balance reports and monthly management accounts followed. In November, we trained the team on sales and budget reporting so they could run it themselves.
The result
Unleashed and Xero now agree. The business has management accounts with real cost of goods sold and margins they can trust, and a budget they report against.
The whole process took nearly 4 months. September 2025 was the busiest month while the numbers were rebuilt. By October to December we were down to a few hours a month, and in January 2026 a single email.
That's how we like it. Get the structure right, teach the team, then step back. The best outcome is a team that knows Unleashed and its own processes better than we do, and knows we're here when they need us.