Xero accounting, turned into financial insight

Accountants and advisors drown in their clients’ numbers. AdvisorFi turned a business’s accounting data into live dashboards its advisor and its owner could read together — pulled straight from Xero, no spreadsheets. Toobler engineered the platform and the subscription business behind it, and developed it over three years.

Customer and context

AdvisorFi is a financial-insights platform for accounting consultants and their clients. It connects to a business’s Xero accounting and turns it into real-time, collaborative dashboards — plus a library of financial-insight apps (Net Income Ratio, Return on Assets, Operating Income, Profit & Loss, Total Payroll) that read the raw ledgers as the ratios advisors actually use. It has two sides: CoachBoard, the consultant’s advisory workspace over a client’s numbers, and the dashboards side — originally CrunchBoard, later renamed Insights — which Toobler merged into a single product. Toobler was the engineering partner behind the platform and its subscription model, from 2013 through 2016.

The challenge

A financial-insights platform is really an integration problem wearing a dashboard:

• The data lives in accounting software, not a dashboard. Getting a business’s numbers out of Xero — reliably, securely, in real time — is the hard part, and everything else depends on it.
• Advisor and client need to see the same numbers. Not a report emailed once a month — a live, shared view both sides trust.
• Raw ledgers aren’t insight. A business owner can’t read a general ledger; the platform had to turn it into ratios and KPIs a non-accountant understands.
• It’s a subscription business. Plans, payments, upgrades and downgrades — the revenue model had to be engineered into the product.
• Two products had to become one. CoachBoard and CrunchBoard were separate; they had to merge into a single platform without losing either.

The solution

A live Xero integration. Toobler built the Xero connection (OAuth) that pulls a business’s accounting data into the platform automatically — no manual imports, no exported spreadsheets. This is the engine the whole product runs on.

Configurable financial dashboards. Dashboards built from add/remove widgets, charts and graphs, and a library of financial-insight apps — Net Income Ratio, Return on Assets, Operating Income, P&L, Total Payroll — that turn the raw Xero data into the ratios and KPIs advisors and owners actually read.

Advisor and client, on the same numbers. CoachBoard gives the consultant a workspace over the client’s financials; the client sees the same real-time dashboards — a shared, collaborative view instead of a monthly PDF.

A subscription business, engineered in. Plan management from free through paid tiers, upgrade and downgrade, discount codes, Braintree payments, and a SuperAdmin for users and subscriptions — the revenue model built into the platform.

Two products merged into one. Toobler merged CoachBoard and CrunchBoard (rebranded Insights) into a single platform, reconciling their data and plans without disrupting either set of users.

Built and evolved over three years — from the initial build through successive sprints, the product merge and continuous enhancement, 2013 to 2016.

Engineering worth naming

• The integration is the product. A reliable, secure Xero pipeline is what makes the dashboards real-time and trustworthy — get that wrong and nothing above it matters.
• Data turned into insight. Financial-insight modules that read ledgers as ratios and KPIs, not just tables.
• A two-sided, collaborative SaaS. Advisor and client working over one live view of the numbers.
• A subscription business built in. Tiered plans, Braintree payments and an admin, as first-class parts of the product.

Results

• A business’s Xero data becomes a live dashboard its advisor and its owner read together — no spreadsheets, no monthly lag.
• Financial insight without an accountant to translate it — ratios and KPIs generated automatically from the accounting data.
• A subscription SaaS with plans, payments and admin, built and then merged from two separate products into one.
• A multi-year engineering partnership — build, integrate, merge and continuously evolve the platform over three years.

What this means for fintech software

Fintech software is an integration problem as much as a product problem: the value is in moving financial data — from accounting systems, banks, payment rails — reliably and securely, and turning it into insight people trust enough to act on. AdvisorFi is that in practice: a financial-insights platform built on a live Xero integration, a two-sided collaborative product with a subscription business engineered in, developed over three years by a long-term partner. If you’re building a fintech or financial-software product and need the platform — and the integrations — engineered and grown with you, talk to Toobler’s engineering team.