AGENCY·DNA
TOOL v1.0
UPDATED 19 SEP 2026
Total cost of ownership — editable, not a verdict

The Shadow Ledger

The published ballpark prices for Light, DualEntry, Rillet, and Campfire all sit above a single Xero subscription — so a sticker-price comparison flatters Xero every time. It's the wrong comparison. A multi-entity group isn't paying for one Xero subscription; it's paying for several, plus a consolidation add-on, plus every hour a finance team spends manually stitching the group numbers together by hand. Enter your own numbers below to see the comparison that actually matters.

Totals, chart and the three editable cost fields below convert at $1 = £0.7394 (mid-market, 10 Sept 2026 — same rate used across this framework). Xero's own plan pricing and named tool pricing stay in their published currency (GBP).
01 — Your current setup

What running this group on Xero actually costs

Defaults reflect published Xero pricing and typical multi-entity workarounds — every field is yours to overwrite with real numbers.

Each is its own Xero organisation — Xero has no native multi-entity mode.
Live Xero UK pricing, Sept 2026 — up from £47 (~$64) (Comprehensive-equivalent) a year earlier.
Scott's Add-in is a lightweight, easy-to-adopt Xero/Excel formula add-in rather than a full consolidation engine; dataSights, Syft, Fathom and Joiin are purpose-built consolidation/reporting layers.
Export, remapping, FX translation, intercompany elimination by hand — lower this if you've already layered any AI or automation onto your Xero workflow (bank-feed categorisation, reconciliation assist, etc.), since the default assumes none of that is in place.
£50/hr (~$68/hr) ≈ a UK Financial Controller on the £73.6K (~$99.6K) average salary, loaded for on-costs.
Informational only — rate above drives the calculation either way.
02 — The platform you're evaluating

What moving to an AI-native ledger costs instead

Defaults come from the indicative pricing in The Xero Exit Framework — third-party estimates, not vendor-published rates. Overwrite them the moment you have a real quote.

Selecting a platform fills in the two fields to the right — both stay editable.
Complexity-based pricing (entities, transaction volume) — not per-seat.
Added once, in month one, on top of the ongoing licence.
None of the four fully discloses autonomous-posting controls — a live human review layer stays, at a reduced hours count.
03 — The comparison that actually matters

Sticker price vs. shadow cost

Current — staying on Xero

The shadow stack

Annual run-rate, this group, today
Total / year£0
Future — on an AI-native platform

The platform

Ongoing annual run-rate, from year two
Total / year£0
Enter your numbers above to see the comparison.

Cumulative cost, 36 months

Staying on Xero Moving to the platform
04 — What's behind the defaults

Every assumption, and how confident to be in it

Xero plan pricing
Live retail pricing from xero.com/uk/pricing-plans, Sept 2026. Solid — this is a published rate card, not an estimate.
Consolidation add-on cost
Generic tiers (£50/~$68 per entity/mo and £300/~$406 per mo unlimited) reflect the published range across Joiin, Fathom, Spotlight Reporting and Syft Analytics (roughly $19–$399/mo). Scott's Add-in ($39 first entity + $12/mo each additional, converted at $1 = £0.7394, mid-market rate, 10 Sept 2026) is its own published rate card — a lightweight Excel formula add-in, not a full consolidation engine. dataSights' published base is AUD $130/mo for 5 entities; the £130/mo (~$176/mo) used here is a real practitioner's own effective billed rate, which sits above that base because it bundles PayPal, Square and a forex-conversion connector — included because it's the most solid figure on this row.
Manual consolidation hours
Default of 14 hrs/entity/month is anchored to a third-party report of 60–80 hours/month for a five-entity Xero group doing export, remapping and elimination by hand — the benchmark assumes no AI or automation is already layered onto that Xero workflow. Directional, not audited — the field exists precisely so you can overwrite it with the real number, lower if some of this is already automated.
Finance hourly rate
£50/hr (~$68/hr) is derived from Reed's UK average Financial Controller salary (£73,652, ~$99.6K), loaded roughly 20–25% for on-costs and divided across a standard working year. Reasonable midpoint, not this business's actual rate.
Close-cycle length
Shown for context, not costed separately (its cost already lives inside the hours line above). APQC's cross-industry median close is 6.4 days; multi-entity Xero groups are independently reported at 10–15 days for a five-entity group. Treat the widening gap as directional.
Platform licence & implementation
Pulled from the confidence-tagged ballpark ranges in The Xero Exit Framework — themselves third-party estimates (Vendr buyer data for Rillet; a quote-based estimate for DualEntry; single-source review-site estimates for Light and Campfire, the latter explicitly peer-anchored to Rillet's Vendr data). USD-denominated figures (DualEntry, Rillet, Campfire) are converted to GBP at $1 = £0.7394 (mid-market rate, 10 Sept 2026) — re-check this rate before relying on these figures at a later date. None of the four vendors publishes a price list. Treat every number here as a starting point for a real quote, never as a quote itself.
Residual labour reduction
70% default is a planning assumption, not a vendor claim — none of the four fully discloses how much human review survives once an agent is doing the posting. See the governance section of The Xero Exit Framework before assuming a lower number is safe.
05 — Want a written recommendation instead?

I'll run these numbers myself, against your real books

This model is deliberately editable and free. If you'd rather hand over your actual entity count, close hours and tooling spend and get a written recommendation back — scored against Agency DNA's Automation Opportunity methodology — that's a Shadow Ledger reading: a paid, one-off engagement, with the fee confirmed before you commit to anything.