We have a compliance arm. You will not be working in it.

If you are a few years into an accounting or finance career and you have worked out that the interesting part is the analysis, not the lodgement, keep reading.

We are a business advisory firm. We work with owners of businesses from $2m in turnover up to $300m, though most of your week will be spent with the ones between $5m and $50m. Builders, manufacturers, health clinics, trades, wholesalers, e-commerce. Real businesses run by people who are excellent at their trade and were never taught how to run a company.

Most of them are scaling, and scaling is where businesses break. Margin quietly erodes, cash goes backwards while revenue goes up, and the owner is the only person who knows how anything works. Our job is to see that coming and fix it before it bites.

Our integrated firm handles tax and compliance for a lot of these clients. That work is done by a separate team. Your side of the business is the forward-looking side. We use the history to find the patterns, then we work on the now and the next twelve months.

The role

Every client meeting runs off a pack: how the business is actually performing, where the money is going, what has moved since last time, and the two or three things that matter most right now.

I build every one of those myself. That is the reason I can only look after a dozen clients.

Your job is to take that off me. Within twelve months you should be building packs I do not need to check, and sitting in the meetings where they get used.

What you will actually do

Turn client financials from Xero and MYOB into a clear picture of what is happening in the business

Collect the numbers that are not in the ledger. Jobs quoted and won, work on hand, productive hours, stock, work in progress, the owner's own targets. Most clients do not track these yet, so part of the job is getting them to

Reconcile what the owner tells you against what the accounts say. When a client says his labour is 20% and the P&L says otherwise, that gap is the finding

Build the recurring client packs: P&L trends, margin analysis, cash position, the KPIs that actually drive each business

Build 13 week rolling cash flow forecasts and keep them current

Management accounting work: job and product costing, gross margin by job, service or line, break even analysis, pricing models and quoting frameworks

Run the diagnostic on new clients, working out where the profit is leaking before we sit down with them

Build what-if models. If they lift price 5% and lose 3% of volume, what happens to the bank account in March

Flag what you see. If a gross margin drops four points, I want to hear it from you before the client says it

Build and use the automations that make all of the above faster

We are building the version of this firm that does not exist yet

We automate everything that can be automated and we use AI across the practice: meeting transcripts into client follow ups, data cleanup, first pass analysis, reporting.

The point is not headcount reduction. The point is that one analyst with the right tools can now do the work of three, which means we can charge properly, do deeper work, and pay better. You will use these tools daily and you will help build them. If that sounds like a threat rather than an opportunity, this is not the job for you.

Who this suits

Two types of people.

Public practice. You can read a set of accounts fast and tell me what is wrong with the business. You are tired of doing last year's work for people who need help with next year.

Industry. You are a management accountant, cost accountant or commercial analyst. You know costings and pricing properly. You want exposure to twenty businesses instead of one.

Either way: you are curious about why numbers moved, and you get something out of working out what is actually going on.

What you need

Three to five years in an accounting, management accounting or finance role

You can read a P&L and a balance sheet and form a view without being prompted

Healthy scepticism. You notice when a number does not make sense and you say so instead of putting it in the model

Strong Excel or Sheets. Not just SUM. If you can build a model, say so

Xero, MYOB or similar

Accounting or commerce degree, or well progressed with CA, CPA or CMA. We will support you finishing it

You write clearly. Half this job is making numbers make sense to someone who is not an accountant

What you do not need

Tax expertise

Advisory experience. If you had it you would be charging more than this

To have done this exact job before. Almost nobody has

What is in it for you

You learn how businesses actually work, from the inside, across a dozen industries at once

Direct line to me. No hierarchy, no partner track queue, no eight years before you meet a client

You work with modern tools instead of arguing for them

Study support if you are finishing CA, CPA or CMA

Moonee Ponds office. On site while you are learning the work, realistically the first six months, then flexibility once you are building packs I do not need to check

Genuine path to advising and coaching clients yourself, not just producing the numbers

How to apply

Send a CV and a cover letter. Not a template one. Three short paragraphs:

The most interesting thing you have ever worked out from a set of numbers

What you are sick of in your current job

Something you have built, in Excel or anywhere else, that you are proud of

Those three answers matter more to me than the CV.

Shortlisted candidates are paid for a half day exercise: a real de-identified set of accounts, and you tell me what you see. That is the actual job, so it is the actual test.