PRACTICE ADMINISTRATION & WORKFLOW COORDINATOR

ABOUT US

We are a chartered accounting firm in New Zealand. We are a small team looking after several hundred business clients, nearly all of them owner-operated.

We run on Xero for accounting, Xero Practice Manager (XPM) for practice management, and FYI Docs for document management.

That experience is the first filter for this role.

We are looking for someone who has worked inside an accounting firm and used Xero and a practice management system as part of their normal working day, rather than someone who has simply seen them in passing.

If that is your background, you should find your feet here quickly.

We are not short of systems. We already have workflow templates, checklists, naming conventions and reporting packs. They are written, they work, and the bones of the system are already there.

What we do not have is one person who owns the admin engine and makes sure everything actually gets finished.

Almost everything here gets prepared and then waits for a human to close the loop:

The job with nobody assigned to it.
The annual return that is one signature away from being filed.
The invoice that never went out after the work was marked complete.
The client email that was drafted three days ago but never sent.

That is the role.

You are the person at the end of those pipes. You keep things moving, follow them through, and make sure the last 10 percent actually gets done.

We would rather hire one capable person properly than spread this work across four people who each do a little bit of it.

We are a small and friendly team. People help each other here, the work is varied, and you will be trusted with real responsibility early on.

WHO YOU WORK WITH

You will work closely with our administrator in New Zealand, who handles everything that needs to happen physically at this end.

Together, you will build and run the administrative systems the firm needs.

They know how the work runs today. You bring the discipline to turn that knowledge into something written down, repeatable and difficult to drop.

Expect plenty of back and forth during your first few months while you work out how each process should run, document it properly, and then hand the routine parts to the right person.

You will also work directly with our director and our accountants.

You can ask any of us anything.

THE WORK

There are six main areas.

You will not be expected to pick them all up at once.

In your first month, expect to focus mainly on client take-on, filing and follow-up. The remaining areas will come across as you are ready for them.

1. NEW CLIENT AND ENTITY TAKE-ON
Set up new clients and entities in XPM and FYI correctly the first time, including group structures, entity relationships, balance dates, IRD numbers, contact records and job templates.
Run the onboarding checklist from beginning to end and hold responsibility for it until every box is closed.
Collect and follow up identity and verification documents. You gather and record the information. A New Zealand accountant assesses it.
Prepare engagement paperwork from our templates and send it for signature.
Request records from the client's previous accountant and follow up until they arrive.
2. COMPANIES OFFICE AND ENTITY ADMINISTRATION

New Zealand has a public companies register that every client company needs to keep current.

The work is deadline-driven, administrative and important. It is also exactly the sort of work that gets forgotten until something becomes late if nobody owns it.

You will handle:

Annual returns, run as a monthly cycle so nothing falls past its filing month.
Company incorporations, name reservations and the associated paperwork.
Trustee company set-ups.
Director, shareholder and share allocation changes.
Registered office, address for service and address for communication updates.
Company name changes and wind-ups. You prepare them, track them, and make sure nothing sits half-finished.
Following up directors for the consents and confirmations required for filings.
Reconciling our internal entity register against the public register and fixing any gaps.

You do not need to have used the New Zealand Companies Office register before.

You do need to be the sort of person who can read the rules once, turn them into a process, and then make sure a due date is never missed.

3. JOB AND WORKFLOW ADMINISTRATION

XPM is our practice management system. It controls our jobs, due dates, workflows and timesheets.

You will:

Run a standing weekly exception sweep covering jobs with nobody assigned, jobs sitting in the same state for more than 14 days, anything past its due date, and recurring templates that have stopped assigning correctly.
Produce one short action list from that sweep, not a long report.
Keep recurring job templates, due dates and job states accurate.
Manage annual accounts intake as client documents arrive, renaming and filing them according to our conventions by group, entity, financial year and category.
Update production sheets from XPM at the beginning of each week.
Maintain client and system data hygiene across XPM, FYI and our other systems.

Systems drift over time. Somebody needs to be the person who notices and cares.

4. DOCUMENTS, SIGNING AND CORRESPONDENCE

You will:

Build and send signature bundles, then follow them up until they come back.
Send final accounts and reports with the appropriate covering correspondence and file the completed documents.
Draft routine client correspondence in our voice, using templates, for approval before it is sent.
Run batch email s where the same communication needs to go to a group of clients. We already have a working process for this. You populate it and run it.
Keep the document management system tidy and consistently named.

If something is filed properly the first time, nobody should need to go looking for it twice.

5. CHASING AND FOLLOW-UP

This is the part that makes everything else work.

If something has been asked for and has not been delivered, you own the follow-up until it is resolved or escalated.

You will:

Maintain one follow-up register covering what we owe clients, what clients owe us, and what members of the team owe each other.
Put a date against every item.
Follow everything up politely, repeatedly and without needing to be reminded.
Follow up our own team for reviews, billing decisions and completed drafts that have not yet been sent.
Follow up clients for documents, signatures and consents.
Follow up timesheet completion and send a short weekly summary.

This is a polite nudge about getting the work done, not a management conversation.

6. BILLING SUPPORT

You will:

Assemble the monthly work in progress workbook from XPM and follow up managers for their billing decisions.
Identify and follow up completed jobs that have not turned into an invoice.
Run the first three stages of debtor follow-up from a written script, with a clear escalation point where responsibility passes to somebody else.
Keep the monthly billing archive tidy and complete.
AND THROUGHOUT: WRITE IT DOWN

We are saying this openly because we have been burned by it before.

Too much of this work currently lives in people's heads.

As you learn each task, you and our New Zealand administrator will document the process together in plain English so the next person does not have to start from nothing.

That is part of the role, not an extra task.

Building a reliable administrative system around the firm will be one of the things we judge the success of this role on.

WHO WE ARE LOOKING FOR

These are genuine requirements rather than a wish list, so it is worth checking them before you apply.

You need:

At least three years' experience working inside an accounting or bookkeeping firm in practice administration, corporate administration or client onboarding. This is different from a general office administration role. Please tell us the firm, the country, and roughly how many clients it looked after.
Hands-on Xero experience at a day-to-day working level. We are not looking for someone who has simply completed a certificate. You should be comfortable opening a messy client file and knowing where to start.
Daily experience using Xero Practice Manager (XPM). XPM runs every job, due date, workflow and timesheet in our firm, so genuine XPM experience puts you well ahead of the field. If you have instead used Karbon, WorkflowMax or a close equivalent properly, tell us what you used and for how long. We are not in a position to teach practice management from scratch.
Daily experience using a document management system. We use FYI Docs, but a comparable system counts if you genuinely used it as part of your normal working day.
Experience running deadline-driven work, in any country, where being late has a consequence.
Confidence working with spreadsheets. You do not need to build financial models, but you should be able to build and maintain a useful working register.
Excellent written English. You will be drafting email s that clients read and that go out under our names.
Discretion. You will handle client identity documents and financial information every day. This is a condition of the role, not a preference.
Reliable internet and a quiet home office.
NICE TO HAVE, BUT NOT REQUIRED
Experience working for an Australian or New Zealand accounting firm.
Exposure to New Zealand GST or payroll.
Experience with a public companies register, trusts, client take-on or verification requirements.
Bookkeeping or billing administration experience.
Experience documenting a procedure for work that was originally handed to you informally.
WHAT ACTUALLY MATTERS TO US
You do not miss a fixed date. Several parts of this role have deadlines set by law and they do not move.
You raise your hand when something looks wrong instead of processing it anyway.
You are comfortable chasing people politely and repeatedly, including people more senior than you.
You can hold a long list without dropping the quiet items on it.
You fi