How We Work
What a client engagement with AKRUA actually looks like
From the first scoping conversation to a real strategic partnership on your financials — here's the path most engagements follow, phase by phase. To make it concrete, we've followed one illustrative example throughout: a hypothetical 3-outlet café group we'll call Nusantara Kitchens.
Weeks 1–2, before engagement start
Scoping & Alignment
Before any work begins, we make sure both sides are aligned on what "done well" looks like.
You'll walk away with: a signed SLA, an agreed budget, and a chart of accounts everyone has actually agreed to — not just assumed.
- Business analysis to understand how the client actually operates
- Defining project goals and what success looks like
- Identifying the client resources and access AKRUA will need
- Setting AKRUA's expectations of the client, and the client's expectations of AKRUA
- Service-level agreement (SLA) definition
- Budget scoping
- Finalizing the expected chart of accounts, financial reporting format, and KPIs
Nusantara Kitchens, in practice
A 3-outlet café group comes to us mid-year. In scoping, we agree on monthly close by the 10th business day, and settle on a chart of accounts that separates dine-in from delivery revenue — something their previous bookkeeper never split out.
Month 1 of the engagement
Setup & Configuration
The groundwork gets laid — systems, data, and people are put in place before we go live.
You'll walk away with: a working cloud accounting setup, connected to your bank and POS, ready for real transactions.
- Gathering existing financial and operational data
- Designing the accounting and reporting solution for this specific business
- Hiring additional resources if the engagement requires them
- Onboarding the client's cloud accounting software (Jurnal.ID, Xero, or similar)
- Cleaning up existing configurations and historical data
- System configuration, including POS, bank feeds, and other integrations
Nusantara Kitchens, in practice
For that same café group, we migrate two years of patchy spreadsheets into Xero, connect their POS and three bank accounts, and clean up over a hundred miscategorized transactions before go-live.
Months 2–3 of the engagement
Live Processing & Refinement
This is where the system meets reality — and where it gets tuned based on how the business actually runs.
You'll walk away with: a first real month of reviewed financials, and a chart of accounts that's been stress-tested against actual data.
- Live processing of bills, invoices, payments, and tax withholding
- Catch-up bookkeeping on prior-period data, if any is outstanding
- Ongoing feedback between AKRUA and the client as real transactions surface edge cases
- Review of the first month's actual reported data against expectations
- Revisions to the chart of accounts, financial format, and KPIs based on real feedback — not assumptions made in Phase 1
Nusantara Kitchens, in practice
In month two, we catch that delivery-platform fees were being recorded as revenue instead of a deduction — a fix that changes their reported margin by several points.
Month 4 of the engagement onward
Strategic Partnership
Once the books are reliable, the conversation shifts from "is this correct" to "what should we do about it."
You'll walk away with: financial reports you actually use in decision-making — not just file away for the tax office.
- Management review of live financial data
- Real business discussions on strategic decisions, grounded in the financial reports
- Resolving any tax exposures uncovered along the way
- Business restructuring for tax and/or operational optimization
- Automation opportunities — scripts, system automation, and integration with non-finance platforms
Nusantara Kitchens, in practice
By month four, the founders use the cleaned-up numbers to decide which of their three outlets to expand next — a decision they couldn't make confidently on the old spreadsheets.