Anthropic shipped Claude for Legal for lawyers and Claude for Small Business for business owners. There is still nothing for the practice in between: what exists assumes US tax law and QuickBooks, and treats the accountant as the person the close packet gets forwarded to. Airclerk helps NZ practices put Claude to work on real client engagements, governed and evidenced, on the systems the firm already runs. We built the NZ Accounting Pack for the work that fills compliance season.
Use Copilot? We can implement on your preferred platform.
New Zealand accounting firms use Anthropic's Claude models across the bounded, reconciled work that fills compliance season: year-end workpaper assembly tied to the trial balance, provisional tax schedules and client letters, FBT workings, payday-filing reconciliations, IRD correspondence triage and client questionnaires. In public practice Claude needs to be connected to the ledger and practice systems, with engagement isolation so one client's records are walled off from another's, and a reviewer's sign-off before anything leaves the building.
Anthropic's Claude for Legal shipped as an open-source repo: 12 practice-area plugins, 151 skills. For this side of the ledger there is Claude for Small Business (May 2026), built around QuickBooks and a US tax-season organiser for the business owner, and an open-source finance plugin for month-end close, journal entries, SOX 404 testing and GAAP-presentation financial statements. We reviewed the open-source skills for New Zealand practice in July 2026, as at repo commit ca3e3fb; New Zealand appears nowhere.
The small-business tax workflow computes US self-employment tax at 15.3%, defaults to a 22% federal bracket, applies the 1099-NEC $600 threshold and chases W-9s, none of which exists here. The NZ regime it would need is provisional tax with its four options and use-of-money interest, schedular payments for captured contractors, and employment information filed every payday.
Everything shipped assumes you are inside one company: one ledger, one close, one set of statements. Anthropic's own launch copy has the small business forwarding its close packet "straight to your accountant"; the accountant is the destination of an export, not the user. Nothing serves a public practice running hundreds of client engagements with engagement isolation, a tax agent's obligations and a reviewer gate on every file. That is not a localisation problem; it is a missing product.
The Airclerk NZ Accounting Pack: 13 starter skills for New Zealand public practice as at July 2026, written to the same skill structure and QA rubric as Anthropic's suites and our own NZ Law Pack. Year-end workpaper packs that tie to the trial balance, provisional tax schedules on the IRD calendar, FBT workings, payday-filing reconciliations, GST exception cases, IRD correspondence triage, AML/CFT onboarding support. Each skill carries source links and verification rules: rates, thresholds, dates and reporting requirements are checked against current IRD, legislation and XRB sources rather than stated from memory. The pack is an accelerator, not a finished product: it is where an implementation starts, and each firm's version diverges from there as skills are adapted to the firm's own workpapers, templates and risk settings. We provide the skills index behind it: each skill, the work it carries, the sources it verifies against. Ask us about it.
The patterns that produce the cleanest path from pilot to production. Each is a candidate first workflow for a Readiness Sprint.
Lead schedules per balance-sheet line, tied to the trial balance, with queries listed and reviewer notes flagged by severity.
The cases Xero doesn't finish: zero-rated land, registration boundaries, adjustments and change of use, flagged before filing.
Instalment schedules by balance date and option, use-of-money interest exposure shown, client letter drafted.
IRD correspondence from the firm's approved feeds, classified by client, deadline and severity; drafts for routine items, escalation for the rest.
Agency-list filing progress, missing-information status, 31 March risk flags and terminal-tax reminders, with questionnaires and chasers drafted in the firm's tone.
Vehicle, loan and unclassified-benefit calculations with the rate options laid out for the reviewer's call.
Payday-filing totals against the ledger, ESCT bands checked, exceptions tabled for review.
Captured-activity checks, CDD level and beneficial-ownership maps under the firm's existing programme.
A monthly practice briefing from IRD, taxpolicy and XRB sources, filtered to what touches your client base.
Behind every workflow sits AI Process Assurance: the reasoning, sources and sign-off retained as an AI review record, the AI Workpaper, so the firm can show what the AI did, how it was checked and who signed off.
The first production workflow is chosen by volume, source availability and ease of review. For most practices that means bounded, reconciled work: workpaper assembly, payroll reconciliations, client chasers, IRD mail triage. Final numbers, tax positions, structuring advice and anything filed stay behind stricter gates, with the accountant.
Each workflow defines who reviews what: partner, manager or the engagement's responsible reviewer. The AI Workpaper records which sources were attached, what changed in review and whether any required gate was missed.
We run the workflow on held-out client jobs before an accountant relies on it: does every schedule tie to the ledger or state its difference, does it verify rates and dates against current sources, does it respect engagement isolation, does it route consequential outputs to the right reviewer. Prompt-injection and cross-client-leakage checks are part of the production gate.
The configured workflow on your systems, a Workflow Charter setting out stages, evidence and approval gates, the evaluation results from the held-out tests, a runbook with training run separately for accountants and support staff, a retained AI Workpaper for each material run, and reviews at 30, 60 and 90 days to check the workflow is being used, not just installed.
Two-week, fixed-price plan.
First governed workflow into production.
Controls, approvals, audit trails.
Monitor, improve, expand.
Everything is deployed to your own Claude instance, under your own agreement with Anthropic.
A Claude implementation plan your partners can stand behind, in two weeks.
New Zealand accounting firms use Claude across the bounded, reconciled work that fills compliance season: year-end workpaper assembly tied to the trial balance, provisional tax schedules and client letters, FBT workings, payday-filing reconciliations, IRD correspondence triage, client questionnaires and chasers, AML/CFT onboarding support, and the GST cases the ledger software doesn't finish: zero-rated land, registration boundaries and adjustments. Airclerk designs and implements these as governed workflows, connected to the firm's ledger and practice systems, whether that is Xero, Xero Practice Manager, FYI, Karbon, MYOB or another stack, with engagement isolation between clients and a reviewer's sign-off on every output that leaves the building. We are Claude-preferred but platform-aware, and can implement on Copilot where that is your standard.
No. Anthropic shipped Claude for Legal for law firms in May 2026 and Claude for Small Business the same month, but nothing for the accounting practice itself. Claude for Small Business is built for the business owner around QuickBooks and US tax (self-employment tax, federal brackets, 1099s and W-9s), with a close packet designed to be forwarded to the accountant; the open-source finance plugin serves the in-house team of one company (month-end close, journal entries, SOX 404 testing, GAAP-presentation statements). We reviewed the open-source skills for New Zealand practice in July 2026 and New Zealand appears nowhere. So Airclerk built the NZ Accounting Pack from scratch: 13 skills for public practice, covering year-end workpapers, GST, provisional tax, FBT, payroll, IRD correspondence, reporting tiers and AML/CFT onboarding, each source-linked to current IRD and legislation materials with verification dates. The pack is an accelerator rather than a product: it is where an implementation starts, and each firm's version diverges from there as skills are adapted to the firm's own workpapers, templates and risk settings.
No. Every output is a draft for the firm's own accountants to review, with sources cited, rates and dates carrying verification tags, and uncertainty flagged. The reviewing accountant takes professional responsibility for anything that leaves the building. The workflow is supervised like delegated work, with added AI-specific controls: schedules must tie to the ledger or state their reconciling difference, proposed tax positions carry their statutory basis, and consequential actions stop for human sign-off. Airclerk is an AI implementation consultancy, not a CA firm and not a tax agent: nothing we build files with Inland Revenue, operates myIR or sends anything to a client except by the firm's own people. Where the firm's practitioners are Chartered Accountants, workflows are designed to support their obligations under the NZICA Rules and Code of Ethics: professional competence and due care, confidentiality, terms of engagement, client monies where relevant, and the profession's ethics and tax-compliance guidance for tax practice.
Two protections come before anything else. Engagement isolation: one client's records are walled off from another client's work. Permission-aware access: the workflow sees only what the person running it is allowed to see in the firm's existing systems. Before any client records are connected, we check the vendor terms: whether inputs are used for training, what is retained and for how long, who the subprocessors are, and where data goes offshore (IPP 12). Everything runs on the firm's own Claude instance, under the firm's own agreement with Anthropic; client records reach it through connections the firm approves and scopes, and nothing routes through Airclerk. Some steps never move into the workflow at all: filing returns or employment information, taking final tax positions, moving client money, AML/CFT compliance-officer decisions and suspicious activity reports, and signing anything stay with the firm's own people. And where people at the firm are already pasting client figures into personal AI accounts, we treat that as the first thing to fix, not a fact of life: an engagement starts by finding where AI is already in use and moving that work onto governed rails.
The AI arriving inside Xero, Karbon and MYOB is genuinely useful, and it belongs to their platforms: it works where their product works, on their roadmap, in their shape. What we implement is different in kind. Claude runs on the firm's own instance and works across systems: the ledger, the practice manager, the document store and the email trail in one workflow, encoded with the firm's own review standards and templates. The firm controls its configured workflows and prompts, and keeps the record of what the AI did. For most practices the two are complements, and the honest comparison is platform features against a build the firm keeps.
Because the pack is the easy part. What is left is the work that decides whether it sticks: drawing out the firm's own review standards and encoding them, connecting the ledger and practice systems with the right scopes, designing the reviewer gates, testing the workflow on held-out jobs before an accountant relies on it, and training people so adoption is deliberate rather than informal. A firm with engineering capacity can do this itself. Most firms would rather buy the weeks back, especially the weeks either side of 31 March.