Digit

23/09/2026

We dropped in on Matt Reed at Sum Effect to see what twelve years of working together looks like from his side of the table

Matt photographs local businesses from a studio in Perth and we do his bookkeeping. When we visited he had seventeen years of prints laid out in front of him, w**e, skincare, a mine site, and he talked about light the way you'd hope your photographer would. If something should look matte, or shiny, or round, you match that feeling with how you light it. He knows when a thing is right, which is why what he said about us means a lot to us

"We do our best work for clients that trust us, and we trust them. Neither of us needs to have a facade about anything"

"Every week for twelve-odd years we've communicated with the team at Digit. Payroll, accounts, payables, missing invoices. That's at least five thousand communications, and it's been flawless the whole time"

"It feels like I'm communicating with myself. The same tone, and it's never mattered who that's with"

"Even in our most financially pressured times we never considered messing with the bookkeeping, because that was the one thing that is just beautiful the whole way through"

Payroll and payments done weekly. BAS lodged on time, every time. A clean set of books for over a decade

Thank you, Matt. The whole story is in the comments

17/09/2026

"Our accounts are up to date. It's all on the record". What the books meant to Matt when things were hard. The third of three short cuts, and the full film is at the link in bio

Film and photography by Sum Effect

09/09/2026

In May we took the whole team up into the mountains in Rizal and spent a day vibe coding with AI. Almost nobody in the room was a developer

One of the team, who had never written a line of code, described a reconciliation to Claude and watched something appear. It wasn't right. The second prompt got closer. The third broke what the first one built, which is the moment git earns its keep. By the afternoon it ran on the sample data and they were showing it to the room

Like every firm, we're full of work that is repetitive, rule-based and chews up time. Activity statements, reconciliations, payroll. Our people know exactly where the friction is, because they feel it every day. What they couldn't do was describe it in a shape a technical person could pick up and build. That gap is why so much of it never gets automated, and closing it turned out to be something you can teach in a day

The aim was to teach our team the skills to translate their manual processes into something that could be automated. To understand the shape of everyday problems

Four things made the day work. A starter kit that had data security, encryption, roles and audit trails pre-thought out (the walls of the sandbox the team played in), so nobody lost the morning to setup. One small problem each, cut down to size before we started, because whoever arrives with a big problem finishes the day with a slide and nothing built. Nobody working alone. And our technical people in the room explaining the error message instead of taking the keyboard

One of the apps that came out of it replaced a payroll tax workpaper at our year end

If you're thinking about running one, the article has how we set it up, how the day ran and what we'd change. Link in the comments

08/09/2026

"It's just been this calm in the chaos". That's Matt Reed of Sum Effect on twelve years of working with us

We dropped in on Matt at his studio in Perth a few weeks back. He photographs local businesses and we do his bookkeeping. Sum Effect filmed the visit and this is the six minutes that came out of it

Matt's story is in the comments. Film and photography by Sum Effect

21/06/2026

Xero Central Discussions end tomorrow. Find out how you can keep the conversations going when you need help

15/05/2026

Your bookkeeper isn't the problem. The job got bigger than one person can handle

Late BAS. Missing invoices. Reports that don't tell you anything. If your bookkeeper is stretched thin but too loyal to say so, these are the signs to watch for

Most businesses don't fire their bookkeeper. They quietly outgrow them. Here are seven signs it's happening, and what to do before the cracks become real problems.

12/05/2026

Anthropic turned down $200M from the Pentagon. OpenAI took the deal. That tells you something

When you choose an AI tool for your business, what does that choice say about your values? We wrote about what we've learned making these decisions ourselves

07/05/2026

88% of spreadsheets contain errors. If yours runs your payroll, that's not a statistic. It's a liability

We mapped the practical path from Excel to a proper cloud finance stack. The baseline costs less than $100 a month

04/05/2026

Your bookkeeper keeps things compliant. Your accountant handles tax. Nobody is looking at the bigger picture

A virtual CFO sits between your compliance work and your decisions. What they actually do, what they cost, and when it starts making sense for your business

What a virtual CFO actually does, when your business needs one, what it costs, and how it fits with your bookkeeper and accountant.

29/04/2026

Choosing a bookkeeping provider is a trust decision disguised as a business decision

BAS agent registration, team model, fixed fees, no lock-in. We wrote the questions you should be asking before you sign up with anyone - including us