What Companies Office Tells Us About Opportunity and Risk for Accounting Firms

As of June 2025, there are 745,169 registered companies in New Zealand. That’s more than three-quarters of a million businesses, each with unique compliance needs, cash-flow challenges, and growth ambitions.

For accounting firms, this is both an opportunity and a warning.

📈 Growth: A Surge of New Companies

In the April–June 2025 quarter alone, 15,959 new companies were registered in New Zealand—a 7% increase on the same period last year.

That’s thousands of potential new clients entering the market, many of them needing professional accounting and advisory support. For firms, it means the client pool isn’t drying up—it’s growing. But tapping into this growth requires capacity, agility, and the ability to deliver more than just compliance.

⚠️ Risk: Removals and Liquidations

In the same quarter, 9,690 companies were removed from the register, and 617 liquidator appointments were recorded.

This churn highlights a tough reality: while many businesses start strong, a significant number struggle to stay afloat. For accounting firms, that translates into client turnover, compliance headaches, and potential revenue loss.

It’s also a wake-up call: firms can’t afford inefficiencies, missed lodgment dates, or lack of proactive client support when so many businesses are at risk of failure.

🏃 The Productivity Drain of Compliance Deadlines

Every month, the ATO and IRD release lodgment schedules—deadlines that leave little room for error. Missing them can mean penalties and, worse, lost client trust.

When accountants are stuck in compliance, chasing deadlines, and firefighting admin work, there’s little bandwidth left to build the advisory relationships that help clients survive and thrive.

💡 The Shift: From Compliance to Client-Facing

The firms that will win in this environment are the ones that can:

• Stay on top of compliance without burning out staff.

• Build capacity to take on new clients.

• Free their senior accountants to spend more time advising and guiding businesses, not just filing returns.

That’s where Beyond the Ledgers comes in.

We don’t replace your compliance team—we help you expand it. By building skilled offshore teams in the Philippines, we give your firm the extra hands to handle the heavy lifting. That means your local accountants can step out of the weeds and step into client-facing, relationship-building work.

🚀 Turning Data Into Action

• 745,000+ companies registered.

• 15,000+ new incorporations in a single quarter.

• 9,000+ removals and 600+ liquidations.

This is the landscape NZ accounting firms are operating in today. The opportunity is massive, but so is the risk. The firms that thrive will be the ones with enough capacity to capture growth, protect client trust, and deliver more value.

👉 At Beyond the Ledgers, we help firms do just that—scaling teams sustainably so you can reduce client churn, stay compliant, and grow with confidence.

Start the conversation today.