Accountant / Process Automation

PKF Doyle & Associates; Wellington; On-site; NZD 60,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

PKF Doyle & Associates seeks an accountant who also builds automation for client work using AI tools. Three days a week you handle client work and financial statements, two days you develop systems that support the whole practice.

We value curiosity and the ability to turn complex processes into repeatable workflows, with documentation so the firm owns the knowledge. No CS degree required, just a pragmatic, learning mindset.

Qualifications

• Solid experience as an accountant at intermediate level or above.
• Interest in automation and using AI tools to improve workflows.
• Ability to document processes and explain automation to others.

Responsibilities

• Turn manual accounting processes into repeatable automated workflows.
• Identify where automation yields reliable outputs and where it doesn’t.
• Determine which jobs to automate and document the rationale.
• Support staff when tools behave unexpectedly and guide proper usage.

Skills

Automation mindset

Curiosity

Tools

Power Query

Claude

Copilot

Job description

Jora New Zealand will close on 9th September 2026. Thank you for being with us, we are cheering you on as you continue your career journey.

A role that probably doesn't exist anywhere else near here

Three days a week you're an accountant. Client work, financial statements, tax, the usual.

Two days a week you build the systems the rest of us use to do that work.

We're looking for one person to do both, because we've come to the conclusion that you can't automate an accounting process properly unless you understand it from the inside. The people who know where year-end actually goes wrong are accountants. So we'd rather teach an accountant the technical side than teach a developer accounting.

What the build half looks like

We're using Claude, Copilot and similar tools to automate the mechanical parts of practice work. Some of this is already running — workflows for year-end preparation, report packs built from Xero exports, structured processes that walk a job from client data through to a finished file. There's a lot more to do.

Your work would be things like: taking a process that currently lives in someone's head and turning it into something repeatable. Finding where our automation produces output that looks right but isn't. Working out which jobs are worth automating and which ones aren't. Writing it all down so the firm owns it rather than one person's memory.

You'd also be the person other staff come to when a tool does something odd, and the person who says "no, we shouldn't use it for that" when we shouldn't.

What we'll teach you

We don't expect you to arrive with development skills. We expect you to arrive interested, and we'll cover the rest — the technical fundamentals, how to write instructions an AI tool will follow reliably, how to test something before it touches a client file, how to document work so someone else can pick it up.

You'll get real time to learn. Two days a week means two days, not "whenever client work is quiet."

What you'd need

Solid experience as an accountant — intermediate level or above, in practice or industry. Enough that you can look at a set of accounts and know when something's off.

And then the thing that actually matters: you're the person in your current job who automates their own work. You built the spreadsheet everyone else relies on. You taught yourself Power Query because doing it manually was driving you mad. You've been poking at AI tools in your own time to see what they can do. Nobody's ever paid you for that side of your brain.

That's the role. We're paying you for it.

You don't need a computer science degree, a coding background, or a portfolio. Curiosity, decent judgement, and a low tolerance for repetitive work will get you further here than any of those.

Why this is worth your time

The profession is being reshaped by this technology, and most accountants will experience that as something done to them. You'd be one of the people doing it — at a firm small enough that your work gets used within weeks, not filed in a transformation programme.

You'd also be building a skill set that very few accountants have. Whatever happens with your career after this, that combination is going to be valuable.

Beyond that: a firm where people know each other, a client base that's been with us for years, mentoring and support towards CA if you're working through it, and a reasonable view on hours.