Accounting Prose won Mid-Size Firm of the Year at the 2026 Xero Partner Awards. We were also a finalist for Advisory Innovator of the Year.
We're proud of it. But an award announcement that only says "we won, we're honored, thanks to our amazing team" is a waste of your time. So here's the more useful version: what the award actually measures, what Xero's judges looked at, and what we do day to day that put us in front of them.
The Mid-Size Firm of the Year Award recognizes an accounting or bookkeeping practice that has balanced scalable innovation with personalized client service. Xero limits the category to US-based Xero partners with 5 to 15 full-time equivalent employees, including the firm owner and any outsourced team members who work as part of a stable team.
Xero assessed nominations across five criteria:
Xero utilization and expertise: deep expertise using Xero to optimize bookkeeping processes and workflows for clients
Client impact and satisfaction: high client satisfaction shown through testimonials, feedback, and retention, plus strong client training and support on the platform
Innovation and efficiency: innovation in bookkeeping practice and use of technology to improve productivity and accuracy
Community engagement and collaboration: active participation in the Xero community through knowledge sharing and thought leadership
Client education and empowerment: proactive education that helps clients manage their own finances better
If you read that list again, you'll notice that something stands out. Four of the five criteria have nothing to do with technical accounting skill; they're about how a firm treats the people it serves and the community it belongs to.
We use Xero exclusively because it's the best accounting software on the planet. That's not a hedge or a preference, it's an operating decision we made years ago and have never regretted.
Running one platform instead of three means our team gets deep instead of broad. Anyone here can open any client file and know exactly where things stand, because the chart of accounts, the close checklist, and the review workflow are standardized across the client base. New team members get Xero certified before they touch a single client file, which we know takes time and money, but it means that once they are certified they can hit the ground running .
The payoff shows up in speed, accuracy, and client happiness. We close our clients' books close by (at least) the 10th day of the month - not the 20th, not "sometime before the quarter ends", not whenever we get to it. We understand that our clients rely on clean and timely financials, and when a founder needs investor-ready reporting for due diligence or a quarterly board meeting, we are able to quickly respond and provide exactly what they need in a flash.
Xero HQ is where we run the practice. Every ledger sits one click away, which sounds small until you compare it to the alternative of hunting through a password manager for the right login while a client waits on the phone.
Every client gets a named team and a single email address, so while they know who closes their books and who runs their payroll and who watches their sales tax filings, they never have to work out which of those people to email about what. That last part is what founders tell us they notice most, because you can send us one message at 2am covering a payroll correction, a vendor bill, and a state notice that turned up in the mail, and by morning all three are with the people who handle them. There's no routing to figure out, no waiting while someone loops in a colleague, and no three separate threads that you're now responsible for tracking. Nobody running a growing company should have to keep a mental org chart of their accounting firm just to ask a simple question.
We built it this way because the alternative, where a client explains their business from scratch to whoever happens to pick up the ticket, is how outsourced accounting earned the reputation it has. Our onboarding team scopes every engagement against the signed proposal in our project management system, which means the team doing the work knows exactly what was promised and nothing falls into the gap between sales and delivery.
Most of what we do is catching things early, whether that's a client three weeks away from tripping a sales tax threshold in a state they don't know they're about to owe, a payroll headcount about to cross the line that changes their filing requirements, or a runway that's shorter than the bank balance suggests because two large invoices haven't landed yet. We'd rather tell you about it in March than have you discover it in June.
Nexus is a good example of the kind of thing that catches founders out, since it's the connection that creates a sales tax obligation in a state and you can pick it up by crossing a sales threshold, hiring someone there, or storing inventory in a warehouse without ever intending to. One of our clients crossed an economic nexus threshold in a state where they'd never registered, and we spotted it in their revenue trend months before the state would have found them, which matters because the notice that eventually arrives in that situation comes with penalties and back taxes attached. Theirs never arrived at all, because they were registered and filing by the time it would have mattered.
Clean books are the floor rather than the ceiling, because a reconciled trial balance still doesn't tell a founder whether they can afford the hire they're considering, which product line is making or losing money, or how many months of runway they actually have once the receivables land. That gap between accurate and useful is where most accounting relationships stall out, and closing it is the part of the job we care about most.
Every client file gets reporting built on top of it, which means access to custom dashboards, standardized management reports, and the specific metrics that run their business rather than a generic profit and loss statement that treats a SaaS company and a law firm as the same animal. A subscription business needs to watch net revenue retention and gross margin per customer, while a professional services firm lives and dies by utilization and realization rates, so building the same report for both of them would be lazy work.
When Xero acquired Syft Analytics for ~$70 million, we were genuinely excited, and having now run it across our client base we think it's one of the strongest moves Xero has made. Syft was already the most used reporting app in the Xero App Store before the acquisition, and folding it into the platform means our clients get custom reporting, interactive visualizations, industry benchmarking, and long-term forecasting without us bolting on a separate tool and a separate bill.
The consolidation capability is what our multi-entity clients feel immediately, because Syft consolidates across entities, platforms, and currencies, which replaces the manual spreadsheet exercise that most firms still run every quarter close and that breaks the moment someone adds a new entity. One of our clients had spent two years trying to build consolidated reporting internally, and we stood it up for them in weeks.
Forecasting is the other half. Xero's built-in analytics give a short-term cash flow view alongside profit and loss trends and a business snapshot, which covers the near-term picture well, and Syft extends that into longer-range forecasting with scenario modeling, so a founder can see what hiring three people in Q3 does to their cash position before they commit rather than after. Founders who used to make those calls on instinct now make them on numbers.
When a client runs a tool without a native Xero connection, we build the bridge ourselves using the Xero API, and this is where Xero's developer platform earns a lot of loyalty from us. The documentation is thorough, updated consistently, and clear enough that someone who isn't a developer can follow it end to end, which is not a given in this industry and is a standard we've started pointing other software companies toward.
That quality is why we can connect Xero to almost anything a client already runs, whether that's a niche billing platform, an industry-specific operations tool, or an internal system nobody else has ever integrated. Our clients end up with a setup built around how their business actually works rather than one they've had to bend their business to fit.
Our founder, Enzo, has been active in the Xero community for more than a decade. That includes a past term on the Xero Partner Advisory Council, where they met regularly with Xero's product, developer, marketing, and sales teams to share what was working, what wasn't, and what our clients needed next.
They also hosted virtual and in-person "Xero Hour" events, which brought accountants together to build community and learn from each other. These monthly events encouraged firm owners to rethink how they work, giving firm owners a chance to hear how their "competitors" were finding and serving clients, which was profoundly impactful. Enzo witnessed the generosity of others, as people shared ideas freely, with no hesitation.
Today their work continues through the Xero Ambassador Program, helping newer accountants adopt Xero in their own practices. Sometimes that's a question about the software. Sometimes it's how to market a Xero practice or get a skeptical team on board with switching platforms. We check in with people repeatedly, because the real test isn't whether someone got their answer in the moment, it's whether they're still moving in the right direction six months later.
We don't see other accountants as competition. A rising tide lifts all ships, and the more of us who get better at this, the better it is for the small businesses we all serve.
Honestly, nothing. The standards that earned the award are the standards we already run on, and they don't move because a trophy showed up.
What it does confirm is that the model works. A finance team can be fractional and still be proactive. A firm can grow without turning clients into ticket numbers. Founders don't have to choose between accurate books and building the business, no matter what the industry has trained them to expect.
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