XBA is a New Zealand consultancy that fixes two problems most small-to-medium businesses carry at once: work done by hand that a system should be doing, and a website that neither convinces buyers nor gets quoted by AI assistants. Presence, AI, automation, integration, and deep Accredo Saturn work. Everything stays auditable, correctable, and owned by your team. No black box, no vendor lock-in.
Personal reply from Andrew within one business day.
Pick the one that sounds most like you. You will get the part of the practice that handles it, roughly what the work involves, and an honest answer about whether it is worth doing yet.
Usually two problems wearing one coat: the site does not convince the people who land on it, and it is not being surfaced to the people who never do. Both get fixed together, because a rebuild that ignores how you get found just moves the problem somewhere quieter.
Honest answer included: sometimes the step is do not do this yet.
Buyers increasingly ask an assistant before they ask Google, and assistants quote sources that are unambiguous, structured and specific. If your site never states plainly what you do and who for, it does not get cited, no matter how it ranks.
Honest answer included: sometimes the step is do not do this yet.
Double entry is the cheapest problem to find and the most expensive to leave. If two systems both hold the truth, one of them is wrong by Friday. We make one of them the source and connect the other to it.
Honest answer included: sometimes the step is do not do this yet.
A recurring manual report is a process with a person standing in for a query. Those are the highest-return automations available, and the easiest to prove: the output either matches last week or it does not.
Honest answer included: sometimes the step is do not do this yet.
AI is very good at a narrow set of jobs in a business and mediocre at most of the rest. The value is in identifying which is which before anything gets bought, then implementing the two or three that genuinely pay.
Honest answer included: sometimes the step is do not do this yet.
Saturn is more extensible than most owners realise. A business rule can be enforced inside the transaction rather than in a spreadsheet beside it, through scripting, scripted forms, custom tables and pricing rules. This is the deepest specialty here.
Honest answer included: sometimes the step is do not do this yet.
The person holding the job already knows the answer. A purpose-built app captures it once, on site, and posts it into the systems behind. That is the whole of the field service case study on this site.
Honest answer included: sometimes the step is do not do this yet.
Two halves of one job. The rebuild handles the people who land on the site. SEO and answer engine optimisation handle the people who never do, including the ones now asking an assistant instead of searching.
What gets fixed and for whom, above the fold. The technology names live on the service pages, where someone looking for them will actually be.
A page that owns each term, instead of one page trying to rank for everything and owning none of it.
Case studies placed against the promise they evidence, not filed away under a Work tab nobody opens.
Clean structure, real headings, and no build that hides the content behind script. Machines read what people read.
A single conversion the whole site is designed around, repeated on every page rather than scattered across five competing calls to action.
Colour contrast checked against every background it is used on, and a performance budget wired into the deploy so a page that regresses does not ship. Held to on this site, not just recommended for yours.
This page is built to its own prescription. The structure above is the structure you are reading, which is the only demonstration of a web rebuild that costs a prospect nothing to verify.
None of the rest matters if a crawler cannot reach the page or a visitor leaves before it finishes painting. Technical work is the floor the other two stand on, and it is the half most often skipped because nobody can see it.
Pages rank when they answer one question completely. A single page trying to cover four topics competes with itself and owns none of them, which is why the map comes before the writing.
An assistant will not cite what it cannot parse or corroborate elsewhere. Structured data and naming the business identically everywhere are what turn a claim on a page into something quotable rather than merely present.
Answer engine optimisation is the practice of structuring a site so that AI assistants can quote it accurately when someone asks them a question it answers. It is not a replacement for SEO; it is what you do once you accept that a growing share of buyers never reach a results page at all.
XBA (Extend Business Automation) is a New Zealand consultancy specialising in Accredo Saturn customisation, including MaxBasic scripting, scripted forms, custom tables and special pricing rules, alongside systems integration and custom apps.
would cite: /accredo · organisation schema
Pick one source of truth per data type and connect the other system to it through its API, then reconcile in parallel before trusting it. XBA documents this approach for Accredo Saturn and job-management systems in New Zealand.
would cite: /accredo/api-integration · FAQ schema · case study
XBA builds custom field service apps that capture the job on site and post parts, hours and invoices straight into the ledger, with a documented New Zealand implementation behind it.
would cite: /work/field-service-management
Measured monthly, against a question set fixed at the start of the engagement and not quietly edited afterwards. A question set that moves can make any trend look like progress, so the list is agreed once and then left alone.
The three answers above are illustrations of a correct citation, not transcripts. What assistants actually say about a business today is the first thing the work measures, and it is usually the least flattering slide in the deck.
Most small NZ businesses get two options when a process is eating their week: hire a large consultancy and wait months for a deck and an invoice, or stitch something together that works until the one person who understood it leaves. Neither leaves you with a system you actually trust.
XBA sits in the middle. Twenty plus years running operations and IT inside a multi-branch distributor, living in Accredo Saturn, writing the scripts, owning the reporting, means the work is automation that eliminates the task, not just manages it. With the ledger kept as the single source of truth and a human in the loop until the system has earned its confidence.
The result is meant to outlast the build: clear ownership, minimal moving parts, no middleware sprawl, and an audit trail you can follow when something looks wrong at month-end.
Presence is the first of the five, and the one this page leads with, because it is the problem most businesses can see. The rest is what has to work once the enquiries start arriving. Each of the nine offerings below has a page of its own; the services overview sets them side by side.
A site that loads fast, reads as credible to the people who land on it, and is structured so search engines and AI assistants can both find it and quote it correctly.
Where AI genuinely removes work, and a straight answer about where it does not yet. Workflows that read unstructured input, classify it, and route anything sensitive to a person before it is committed.
The re-keying, the chasing, and the weekly spreadsheet somebody rebuilds by hand. Automated so that the audit trail survives the change and the output can be checked against the old one.
Two systems that should talk to each other and do not, plus the custom apps that sit on top of them and capture the work where it actually happens.
The deep specialty: event scripting, scripted forms and documents, custom tables, special pricing rules and API work, making Saturn do the specific thing your business does.
No big-bang rollouts. Every engagement starts small enough to walk away from, and each stage has to earn the next one.
From one-off next-day quick wins, to complete business opportunity scoping, ending in a written map for you to keep.
A working proof against real data in a sandbox, so you can judge the concept before committing to a build.
The production build, connected to your live systems with proper validation, logging and a documented handover.
Ongoing monitoring and tuning as volumes, APIs and models change — at a predictable retainer, or handed to your team for full ownership.
"If it breaks reporting, it's not an option."
The ledger is the anchor. Nothing ships that compromises the numbers you run the business on.
"Manual is acceptable only when bounded."
A contained manual step is fine. One that grows with every new order is a problem worth solving.
"Cheap only matters if nothing changes."
The lowest-cost option that can't adapt is the expensive one. Builds are made to survive the next change.
A multi-branch services operation was scheduling techs out of a whiteboard, a shared calendar and three spreadsheets, then re-keying every completed job back into Accredo Saturn by hand. XBA replaced the lot with one application that looks and behaves like it was always part of Accredo.
The full write-up covers the two-path integration decision that made it work — which data travels Saturn's OData API and which has to be posted natively by MaxBasic — the three design decisions behind the module, and an honest account of when a build like this is not worth doing.
Got a process like this eating your team's week? The audit is free — and yours to keep.
Book a free process auditMulti-branch wholesale distributor
An end-to-end process nurturing customer returns and repairs for a large tech company fielding hundreds of returns per day. A web app for warehousing ingests to a backend database layer before being approved into Accredo. Full visibility and audit trail.
→ hundreds of returns a day captured once — zero re-keying
Wholesale distribution · finance
A special-pricing rule engine handling multi-tier customer agreements inside Saturn, so quotes and invoices resolve the right price automatically and the sales team stops maintaining it in spreadsheets on the side. Prices update with customer performance.
→ every quote resolves the right price automatically — side-spreadsheets retired
National operations team
A suite of browser-based dashboards reading live ERP data for branch performance, stock and pricing — replacing manual spreadsheet pulls with a single view the whole team can open, refreshed on its own. AI-powered analytics in a headless system.
→ manual spreadsheet pulls eliminated — one live view for the whole team
Sales & finance operations
Keeping customer and deal records aligned between the Saturn ledger and a CRM, so sales and finance work from the same picture instead of two drifting copies — with the ledger held as the authority when they disagree.
→ sales and finance on one picture — the ledger stays the authority
// Identifying details removed. Representative of the work, not a client register. Real references available on request.
Most of what is on this page is work any competent consultancy could describe. This part is not. Accredo Saturn is a New Zealand ERP with a small specialist community around it, and twenty years inside one is the reason the rest of the practice can promise that an automation will still reconcile at month end.
The Accredo pages stay exactly where they are, linked from the Services menu and from here. Nothing has moved and no URL has changed. What has changed is the order in which the practice introduces itself.
I'm Andrew — operations and IT systems manager turned independent automation consultant, based in New Zealand.
I've spent the last twenty plus years on the inside: running operations and managing the IT systems for a B2B wholesale distributor with branches across the country, with Accredo Saturn as the daily source of truth. I've written the MaxBasic scripts, set up finance processes, built the reporting, planned ERP migration, rolled out multiple successful integrations and managed the people whose work the automation was meant to make easier.
That's the difference XBA is built on. I'm not arriving with a generic playbook — I've lived the trade-offs you're weighing. I know what a Saturn customisation costs to maintain, where middleware turns into a liability, and why the right answer is sometimes to leave a process manual and just make it bounded.
The about page covers what that experience actually consists of, how an engagement runs, an honest comparison of an independent specialist against your Accredo partner and a general developer, and where XBA says no.
The process audit is free — a written opportunity map you keep either way. Everything after that is quoted fixed-price, stage by stage, before it starts: prototype, build, support. You see the number, then decide. You can stop after any stage and keep everything produced up to that point. No hourly meters running in the background.
That risk is exactly what the staged approach exists to remove. Prototypes run against a copy of your data in a sandbox — never your live company. Production builds go in with validation, logging and a rollback path, and the first principle of every build is that your reporting and ledger stay intact. If a change would compromise the numbers you run the business on, it doesn't ship.
No. Your QSP relationship, licensing and upgrades stay exactly where they are. I build the customisations, integrations and automations that sit on top — and I document them so your partner can see precisely what's there. The work is complementary, and I'm happy to coordinate with them directly.
Yes. Accredo is the deep specialty, but the integration and automation work — connecting Xero, MYOB, Microsoft 365, HubSpot and the systems around them, and building AI-assisted workflows — is system-agnostic. The same principles apply: auditable, correctable, owned by your team.
New Zealand-based and remote-first, working with businesses nationwide. Most of the work — scoping, prototyping, building, support — runs perfectly well remotely. Where being on the floor matters, like mapping a warehouse process or a go-live, I'll be on site.
You do. Scripts, integrations, documentation — it all lives in your systems, under your control, with a written handover your team can follow. You can have me maintain it on a predictable retainer or run it entirely yourselves. No vendor lock-in is a design requirement, not a slogan.
A short, no-obligation look at where the manual work is. Tell me what's eating your team's week and I'll tell you honestly whether it's worth automating — and hand you a written opportunity map either way.
