The questions we actually get asked.
Straight answers on pricing, scope, compliance, and what happens between the first email and a working tool in your practice.
Engagements & pricing
What does an Audit actually cost?
A$4,500 fixed. It runs for two weeks, includes a half-day onsite workshop (or remote), 3–5 staff shadow sessions, a written report ranking the top 5 AI opportunities, and a 90-minute readout call. Your first five engagements get a founding-client rate of A$2,500.
Do you charge hourly?
No. Every engagement is fixed price, fixed scope. Hourly billing punishes the leverage we sell. If we get faster with better tools, you should benefit from that, not be punished by a smaller invoice.
How much does a sprint cost?
Between A$12,000 and A$28,000, fixed, for a 3–6 week sprint. Price depends on integration complexity (e.g. a standalone drafting tool is cheaper than one that writes into Class or BGL directly). You get a signed one-pager defining scope, inputs, outputs, acceptance criteria, and out-of-scope items before we start.
What’s the retainer for?
After a sprint, most practices keep us on a monthly retainer (A$3,500–A$7,500/month). It covers tuning, evals, new use cases, frontier-model upgrades, monitoring, and standing "practice office hours" for staff questions. Minimum term is 3 months, billed monthly in advance, cancel anytime with 30 days’ notice after that.
Do you offer payment terms?
50% upfront, 50% on acceptance for audits and sprints. Retainers are billed monthly in advance. We can invoice via your accounting stack directly; most clients prefer that.
Who we work with
Is my practice the right fit?
Yes if you’re an SMSF administrator, boutique accounting firm, or hybrid practice with between 5 and 50 staff in Australia. If you’re larger than that, we can still help, but we’ll probably recommend a different delivery model.
I’m a one-person practice — is this overkill?
Often yes. At 1–4 staff you usually want a consumer AI subscription, a sharpened prompt library, and a half-day session to set it up. That’s not really what Westringia does — we’ll tell you that on the discovery call instead of selling you something that won’t move the needle.
We’re not an SMSF firm, just accounting/bookkeeping. Do you still work with us?
Yes. The core workflows — reconciliation, correspondence, onboarding, SOP search, audit prep — all apply to general accounting and bookkeeping practices too. SMSF admin is our sharpest focus, but it’s not an exclusion.
Tools, data & compliance
Which software do you integrate with?
The Australian practice stack: Class Super, BGL Simple Fund 360, Xero, MYOB, HandiSoft, APS, SuiteFiles, FYI Docs, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace. If it has an API or a stable export, we can work with it. If it doesn’t, we’ll tell you before you sign.
Where does our client data live?
Wherever you need it to. Default is your existing cloud (M365 or Google Workspace) plus a dedicated tenant in a reputable provider (usually Anthropic, OpenAI, or Azure OpenAI with enterprise agreements that exclude training on your data). We sign a written data handling agreement before any client data touches a model.
Is this ATO / ASIC / TPB compliant?
We position AI tools as assist, not replace. Staff always review and approve output that goes to clients or regulators. We don’t build tools that give financial or tax advice. We’ll walk through your specific compliance posture during the Audit and flag anything that needs legal sign-off before it ships.
Do you have professional indemnity insurance?
Yes, with cover scoped to AI work in financial services. We can share a certificate of currency with any firm that asks, before signing.
What about frontier models changing every few months?
That’s precisely why ongoing retainers exist. We track frontier model releases (Claude, GPT, Gemini, open-weights), re-run your evals when models change, and upgrade only when the numbers say yes. You don’t have to care about any of that.
Delivery & timelines
How long before we see something working?
Audit report in 2 weeks. First working tool in 3–6 more weeks. Most practices have an AI workflow live with their staff inside 2 months of the first call.
How much of my team’s time does this take?
For the Audit: two half-days total for the principal/ops lead, plus about an hour each from 3–5 staff for shadow sessions. For a sprint: weekly 30-minute check-ins plus whatever staff review time is needed for acceptance testing.
Remote or onsite?
We deliver remote-first, but we’ll come onsite for the Audit workshop and for Sprint handover training if you’re in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, or Perth. Travel outside those cities is quoted per engagement.
What happens when the sprint ends?
We hand over working software, written SOPs, Loom walkthroughs per workflow, and an exception-handling playbook. 30 days of post-launch tuning is included. After that, you either run it in-house or move to a retainer.