The AI bookkeeper for Australian pest control
Hunter's Bookkeeper costs a job properly — labour, travel, chemicals and a share of the overhead — then rolls it up into margin by service, technician, customer and suburb, recurring revenue month by month, cohort churn, a thirteen-week cashflow and a quarterly GST set-aside. It syncs both ways with Xero and QuickBooks Online. It does not move money, and every screen that could be mistaken for doing so says so first.
Last reviewed
Replaces a part-time bookkeeper and a fractional finance manager. Employing somebody to do this work in Australia costs about $55,000* a year — which is what the figure is, not what we charge.
What the Bookkeeper does
Job costing including the drive there and its share of the ute
Labour at the rate you entered, chemicals at what you actually paid, supplier bills, travel time and a share of your monthly overhead pool. The number this produces is lower than the one most systems show, and on some jobs it crosses from profit to loss — that is the correct number. Hunter has no default overhead rate and refuses to invent one, so until you enter yours it says on the screen that what you are looking at is a contribution margin.
Margin by service, technician, customer and suburb
The same rollup, sliced four ways. This is the report that tells an operator the cheap recurring work in one suburb is subsidising the flashy job on the other side of town, which is almost never what they expected. Hours that had no pay rate against them are reported rather than costed at nothing, so you can see how much of the margin is real.
Recurring revenue as the headline number
Monthly recurring revenue, snapshotted at the end of each month so a price change today cannot rewrite what last March looked like. Two narrowings that matter: agreements with a value but no subscription behind them are reported in their own column and never summed into the headline, because money agreed is not money set up to collect itself. And there is no expansion or contraction split — Hunter keeps no price history, so those figures are left empty rather than filled with a zero that would read as a fact.
Cohort churn, by month joined
Who stayed, grouped by when they arrived — which is the only way to tell whether last winter's customers were worse than this winter's, or whether the business just got bigger.
Acquisition cost against lifetime value, per channel
Enter what you paid a channel in a month and Hunter divides it by the customers that channel actually produced, then sets that against what a customer from it has been worth. Where you have not entered spend, the cell is empty rather than guessed. There is no ad-platform connection and none is claimed, and the offer's 'by service line' half did not ship: a customer is acquired once, and somebody who arrives for a one-off job and stays on a termite plan has no single answer. Margin by service category lives on the profitability report, which is the honest place for that question.
What we do not claim
The offer originally promised: Ad platform integration so acquisition cost calculates itself. There is no ad connector, and building five of them is a different product.
Thirteen weeks of cash, honestly bounded
Invoices due in, supplier bills due out, and the GST set-aside, against an opening balance you type in with the date you entered it for. It excludes wages and superannuation, rent, finance, insurance and tax instalments — everything that never passes through Hunter — and that exclusion list is printed on the page rather than buried, because a thirteen-week forecast that quietly omits payroll is exactly the one an owner would act on. Read it as the trend, not as your bank account.
What we do not claim
The offer originally promised: Bank feed and automatic reconciliation into the ledger. That belongs in the accounting system, and duplicating it would create a second version of the truth about the bank.
A GST set-aside you can actually act on
What to put aside this quarter, what you have already reserved, and how far short you are. Hunter does not move money — there is no column, verb or button anywhere that transfers anything, and the page opens by saying so. It is also not a lodgement figure: it carries no adjustments, no capital purchases and no private-use apportionment, because Hunter never sees them.
What we do not claim
The offer originally promised: GST funds swept to a separate account automatically. Moving a customer's money is a banking-rails and licensing posture Hunter does not have. There is no rail, no authority and no account.
Categorised and reconciled into the ledger
Invoices, payments, credit notes, bills and fees sync both ways with Xero and QuickBooks Online, with per-line tracking categories, duplicate matching, a drift check that finds what stopped agreeing, and a month-end close routine. MYOB is not supported. We would rather you read that here than find out after you have migrated.
What we do not claim
The offer originally promised: Automated categorisation and reconciliation into Xero or MYOB. There is no MYOB connector and inventing one would contradict Hunter's own integrations page.
Nothing entered twice
The technician's chemical use, the labour hours, the parts and the job's invoice all originate in the field and flow to the ledger. There is no double entry because there is no second system of record — and where a sync fails, it fails visibly with what to do about it rather than silently.
Debtor chasing that escalates, including by text
The ladder moves from email to text to a task, and it stops when the invoice is paid or when a payment is already in flight against it. What it cannot see is money that landed in your bank and was never recorded against the invoice — that is a bookkeeping gap rather than something software can wish away, and pretending otherwise would be the wrong promise.
Spend to lead to booked to completed to revenue
Counted per journey rather than per record, so a customer who enquires online and then rings is one lead. Revenue is deliberately not deduplicated — a customer on a plan contributes every month, and collapsing that would make a recurring channel look like a one-off one. And the leads with no source recorded get their own row rather than being spread across the others or folded into 'other': knowing that a large share of your work arrived with nobody writing down where it came from is the finding, and a report that hides it is worse than no report.
Calls transcribed and tagged by source, intent and outcome
Every call Hunter answered is transcribed and tagged, which turns the phone from an unmeasured channel into a reported one. Only calls Hunter answered leave a transcript, so a call somebody picked up on a forwarded mobile is not in these numbers, and every screen that reports on them says so.
The weekly summary, on your phone on Sunday evening
What the week did, what is at risk, and what needs a decision on Monday — by email or text, in your business's own timezone, with everything ever sent kept in full so you can re-read Sunday's briefing on Wednesday. It is not a push notification and Hunter is not a native app; on your phone is true of a text and of an email read on a phone.
What we do not claim
The offer originally promised: A Sunday night push notification on the owner's phone. There is no push infrastructure in Hunter and none is being built — it is a website in an app shell, not a native app.
Supplier and chemical price rises, before they bite
Built from your own purchase orders and approved bills — what your suppliers actually charged you, over time, against the margin on the work it went into. There is no supplier catalogue feed, no price index and no benchmark against other operators. An item you have not bought or been billed for in the window simply is not there, and the report says so.
The number that changes when you cost a job properly
Most field software computes a job's margin as revenue minus the parts. Hunter adds the labour at the rate you entered, the travel time, and a share of the monthly overhead pool — the ute, the insurance, the phones, the software.
The result is lower, and on some jobs it turns a small profit into a small loss. That is the point of doing it. But it has one consequence worth stating plainly: any margin figure quoted from a system that did not do this is a contribution margin, and is overstated wherever pay rates were missing. Hunter reports the hours it had no rate for rather than valuing them at nothing, so you can see how much of the number is real.
The overhead allocation prints its own arithmetic on every job — the pool, the number of jobs it was divided across, the share. It is one defensible method among several, and you can choose a different basis if you disagree with it. It is shown so you can check it, not asserted as correct.
What it does with money, and what it never does
Hunter raises invoices, takes card payments and bank debits against authorities your customer has given, and pushes the lot into your ledger. That is the whole of its authority over money.
It does not sweep GST into a separate account. Moving a customer's money is a banking posture Hunter does not have, so what ships is a calculated set-aside: what to put away, what you have already put away, and the shortfall. The page opens by saying Hunter does not move money and that the transfer is yours to make.
It does not reconcile your bank. That stays in Xero or QuickBooks Online, where it belongs, and the thirteen-week cashflow starts from an opening balance you type in with the date you entered it for.
It does not provision cash for warranties, or open an account for anything. Where it calculates a reserve, the figure is for your accounts and the screen says exactly that.
- Invoices, payments, credit notes, bills and fees, synced both ways
- Card and Australian bank debit, with a debit shown as in flight until it lands
- A GST set-aside, calculated and never transferred
- A thirteen-week forecast that names what it excludes
- No bank feed, no reconciliation, no MYOB
Where the reporting stops and honesty starts
Three of the figures on this page are narrower than a finance dashboard would normally imply, and each narrowing is printed on the screen that shows the number.
| The figure | What it counts | What it deliberately excludes |
|---|---|---|
| Recurring revenue | Live subscriptions at month end, snapshotted | Agreements with a value but no subscription behind them, reported separately |
| Acquisition cost | Spend you entered, over customers that channel produced | Anything from an ad platform; the cell is empty where spend is missing |
| Thirteen-week cash | Invoices, supplier bills and the GST set-aside | Wages, super, rent, finance, insurance and tax instalments |
| Job margin | Labour, travel, chemicals, bills and an overhead share | Nothing — but hours with no pay rate are reported, not costed at nothing |
| Attribution | Leads, bookings and completions, per journey | Anything before first contact; there is no pixel, cookie or click data |
Common questions
- Does Hunter replace Xero?
- No, and it should not. Hunter is where the work happens and Xero or QuickBooks Online is where the accounts live; invoices, payments, credit notes, bills and fees flow between them both ways, with duplicate matching and a drift check that tells you what stopped agreeing. Bank reconciliation stays in the ledger.
- Do you support MYOB?
- No. Xero and QuickBooks Online sync both ways and MYOB is not supported. It is written on the integrations page as well as here, because finding that out after a migration is a much worse experience than reading it before one.
- Does Hunter put my GST aside for me?
- It calculates what to put aside and tracks what you have reserved, and it moves no money at all. There is no transfer verb anywhere in the product. It is also not a lodgement figure — it carries no adjustments, capital purchases or private-use apportionment, because Hunter never sees any of those.
- Why is my job margin lower in Hunter than in my old system?
- Because it includes the drive there and a share of your overheads, and because it does not value unpaid-rate labour at nothing. The old figure was a contribution margin. Hunter also tells you how many hours it had no rate for, so you can judge how much of the difference is data and how much is reality.
Want to see this one on your own book?
We take one pest control business per postcode, so the demo starts with whether yours is open.
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