Insolvency & Corporate Recovery
“As insolvency practitioners we have duty to gather the books and records of a large number of companies, the vast majority of which tend to use cloud based accounting software, such as Xero. Numerint has been a great tool to assist us in gathering these records. It is quick, easy to use and convenient.”
Securing the Books and Records in Liquidation and Administration
When an insolvency practitioner is appointed as liquidator or administrator, whether in a creditors' voluntary liquidation, a compulsory liquidation, an administration or another formal insolvency process, one of the first duties is to take control of the company's books and records. The duty is not discretionary. Practitioners are required to gather and preserve the accounting records of every company they are appointed over, both to meet their statutory obligations and to support the investigations, reporting and creditor work that follows an appointment. In England and Wales, for example, the Insolvency Act 1986 lets the office-holder take control of the company's books and records and requires its directors to cooperate.
The practical reality of that duty has changed. Historically, "books and records" mostly meant physical files and a desktop accounting package. Today most companies keep their financial records in cloud accounting software, and for a large share of them that software is Xero.
Xero Access Is Not the Same as Holding the Records
Insolvency practitioners run into the same problem on almost every appointment: having access to the Xero organisation of a company in liquidation or administration is not the same as holding its records.
A Xero subscription can lapse as soon as a company stops paying for it. The director who set up the login may be uncontactable, uncooperative or no longer involved. Even where a practitioner does get access, Xero's own data retention is not indefinite; records eventually age out or become unavailable once a subscription ends. None of that lines up with a practitioner's obligation to hold a complete and durable set of records for the life of an appointment and afterwards.
What is needed is straightforward in principle: get the complete dataset out of Xero quickly, in a form that stands on its own, independent of whether the subscription survives, whether the login still works and whether Xero's retention window is still open.
How Numerint Exports a Company's Xero Records
Numerint pulls a complete export: the full accounting data (such as invoices, bills, contacts, purchase orders, quotes, manual journals, credit notes and bank transactions) alongside every file attachment stored against those records. The connection to Xero is read-only, so there is no risk of altering the records being gathered. The output arrives in two parts, an organised Excel workbook covering the accounting data and a ZIP of structured, sensibly named folders for the attachments. That combination is what makes the export usable: a case team can go straight into review work, reporting or a fraud investigation without first having to untangle a dump of raw exports.
Exporting the accounting data takes minutes. The file attachments take longer, and for a large organisation they can take weeks because of Xero's speed limits.
Using the Records in Investigations and Creditor Work
Bank transactions and manual journals can show payments to directors and connected parties, which helps with the director's loan account and with finding possible preferences or transactions at an undervalue. Sales invoices and contacts give a starting point for collecting book debts, and bills and contacts help build the list of creditors. Xero does not keep the PDFs it creates for sales invoices, so Numerint can generate a PDF of each invoice to send copies to debtors.
Exporting Xero Records Across Many Appointments
Insolvency practitioners rarely deal with one appointment at a time. They run this exercise across many Xero organisations on an ongoing basis, as new appointments come in.
Numerint's workflow repeats at that volume without changing: the same read-only connection, the same export process and the same structured output, for however many companies a firm is appointed over in a given month. Numerint is priced per export, on the number of file attachments, and has no subscription. That fits how insolvency practices work: a steady flow of appointments, each needing a complete set of records gathered at the outset.