Retail, Food + Consumer Goods

NEOZ Lighting is a global cordless lamp technology company. Delivering industrial design technology and fully manufactured products to market. Their luxury cordless lamps, comprising a custom LED bulb and high-capacity Lithium-ion rechargeable battery cell, are marketed primarily to hospitality venues across the world – with 85% of their customers overseas.

Historically, we had two staff members wearing all the accounting hats and the challenge was that they were operationally stretched. Their skills were far better utilised within procurement and shipping, tracking receivables, design process, identifying and fixing quality issues, and DevOps. So, the opportunity cost of them focusing on accounting versus those other important tasks and then leaving the numbers to specialist accountants, was quite significant.

A lot of accounting processes weren’t defined within the business and to staff internally. From an operational perspective, it was a massive task each week to get payroll processed, ensuring all the little things like leave were accounted for. Then there were the bigger items such as BAS and tax liability import/export calculations to be managed.

We had considered building an internal team, but like law, accounting structure and legislation is constantly evolving. Plus, we operate within a niched capability around procurement and industrial design engineering. We felt we were far better off hiring people to work within the core business.

This posed a great opportunity to outsource the accounting and build an extension to our existing team. We’re big fans of outsourcing at NEOZ – we outsource our digital marketing, IT services and now our accounting.

When Aretex came on, their first order of business was to assist in our migration to Xero and set up the integration with our inventory management system (Dear). This was a monumental task and one that they handled exceptionally well. We then needed experts to adopt best practice and run Dear and Xero as seamlessly as possible.

They do our BAS, payroll – full operational accounting – technology integration, procurement systems, and Xero.

As a fully outsourced accounting company, Aretex are now responsible for all of our operational accounting – payroll and superannuation, BAS, cashflow management, accounts payable and receivable, account reconciliation – as well as technology integration and management, procurement systems, Xero administration. It’s fantastic! The numbers are accurate every week and we can rely on their reporting for other important business decision-making.

We love their high touch approach. Our staff now think of them as our own internal accounting department. And having access to a quality operator like Chris has been a gamechanger. Being able to get his thoughts and insights on certain things is like having a CFO without being here all the time.

The fact that they work with other companies adds another string to their bow. Bringing that knowledge and those experiences to being able to solve problems for us.

Jon Hemming, CEO