Structured software evaluation and migration roadmap for a company running on legacy MYOB with no CAS permit and a 15-day month-end close

The brief

A Manila-based international moving and storage company — nearly 50 years old, multi-entity, with 80% of revenue billed in USD — had been running its books on MYOB for years. It worked, but barely scaled. Month-end close took 15 days driven entirely by manual bank reconciliation. BIR VAT returns and alphalist required a separate eBIR portal workflow layered on top of normal bookkeeping. There was no CAS permit on file. And a Finance leadership transition was approaching — meaning whoever came next would inherit a system that required deep institutional knowledge to run.

The brief, captured directly from the Accounting Manager in discovery: “An all-in-one machine where you feed all financial information and data and it produces an efficient finished product on a timely basis.” That became the filter every platform was measured against.

What I built

A single, decision-ready HTML report: LMS Accounting: The Path Forward. Not a slide deck, not a raw spreadsheet — a structured document designed to hand ownership a defensible recommendation with full rationale.

The report covers:

• Situation framing — four cards summarizing the problem (15-day close, BIR compliance gap, multi-currency complexity, succession risk)
• Discovery anchor — the accounting team’s stated non-negotiable, verbatim, as the filtering criterion
• Four-candidate evaluation — QNE Cloud (front-runner), Xero (strong runner-up), QuickBooks Online (not recommended), MYOB (baseline comparison) — each with a structured pros/cons breakdown, a risk callout, and a tagged verdict label
• 11-criteria side-by-side comparison table — BIR form generation, CAS certification, multi-currency, bank feeds, month-end automation, alphalist, API depth for a future intelligence dashboard, multi-entity support, local PH support, succession readiness, and cost estimates
• Two open questions that gate the final call — framed as cards requiring vendor demo answers before recommendation is final
• Five-step decision sequence — action items with owners and sequencing from “book demos” through “final recommendation to ownership”
• Migration timeline — target demos by June 1, migration window July–September, go-live Q3 2026

The report is fully responsive, typeset in a Georgia serif + Helvetica Neue system with a navy/gold palette, and designed to render cleanly on screen and in print.

How it’s built

Two files: index.html (the full report) and lms-report-styles-draft.html (a visual style exploration). The report is hand-coded HTML/CSS — no framework, no dependencies, no JavaScript. Layout uses CSS Grid for the executive summary block and comparison table, with clamp-based fluid type scaling and a responsive breakpoint at 680px. The design system uses four CSS custom properties for the color palette and relies on system-safe font stacks (Georgia for editorial weight, Helvetica Neue for labels and data). The result loads instantly, prints without adjustment, and has no external asset dependencies.

Why it matters

The client’s accounting infrastructure was operationally fine but strategically fragile — it would not survive a Finance transition intact, and it had no path to the management intelligence dashboard planned for later in the engagement. This report gave ownership something they didn’t have before: a clear, evidence-based picture of the decision in front of them, the two open questions that actually controlled it, and a concrete sequence for reaching a final call before the migration window closed.

The front-runner recommendation — QNE Cloud — was selected specifically because it eliminates the BIR manual bridge entirely, meaning the next Finance hire does not need to know how to work the eBIR portal. Succession risk baked into the software selection. The runner-up (Xero) was preserved as the stronger choice under two specific conditions — both of which the pre-decision action plan was designed to resolve.