Gilligan Rowe & Associates rebuilt its compliance operating model around Zato, processing 1,400+ jobs while retaining New Zealand quality control and partner sign-off.
This case study was drafted by GRA and reflects the firm’s own operating experience and internal assessment.
The additional margin is earmarked for practice growth.
Gilligan Rowe & Associates (GRA) is a New Zealand chartered accountancy practice of approximately 150 people, operating across three divisions: business services, asset planning and professional trusteeship. Business services accounts for the majority of the firm’s processing volume and revenue.
Our production model has long relied on offshore processing, with quality control retained in New Zealand. That structure gives us scale on compilation work, but it also means the cost of production sits largely in outsourced labour - and that is the main layer AI displaces first.
Zato is our primary AI compliance platform. We have moved to the enterprise release of Zato and have been rebuilding the end-to-end annual compliance workflow around it, working directly with the Zato team as the capability has developed.
More than 1,400 compliance jobs have been processed through Zato since May 2026.
The end-to-end workflow now runs in four stages, from work intake through to client presentation. AI is applied at every stage; a person remains accountable at every stage.
Received and scoped through the Zato platform, with work intake, client queries and supporting information managed through the same workflow.
AI-driven processing. Compilation of the financial records and supporting workpapers is performed through the platform, reducing manual preparer time, with staff intervening where required.
AI-assisted quality control review, performed in New Zealand by qualified reviewers who retain sign-off.
AI-driven record finalisation and AI alignment journals, then partner review and presentation to the client.
Compliance work is not an unattended process. Transitioning to an AI-driven production environment requires a balance of people and AI. The platform supports the workflow end to end; it does not take professional responsibility. Every file passes a qualified New Zealand reviewer before it reaches a client, and the partner review at finalisation is unchanged.
What has changed is the nature of the work people do. Reviewers are no longer assembling records and chasing queries - they are checking, interrogating and exercising judgement on output that arrives substantially complete. This reduces reviewer time spent on routine production, while the platform reduces the manual preparation required upfront. Where the AI output needs intervention, our staff intervene, and that feedback loop has been a material part of the implementation.
We have not shortened or thinned the review step in order to capture savings. Our QC standard is unchanged, and it remains in-house.
The reduction in our backroom footprint has come entirely from outsourced processing and administrative labour. We predominantly outsource compilation and operate rigorous quality control in-house; outsourced production is where AI removes work most directly, and that is where we have obtained labour savings.
There have been no New Zealand labour reductions as part of the transition to date. Capacity released inside New Zealand - principally review and administrative time - has been redirected rather than removed. Those staff have been reprioritised onto client-facing and value-add work: advisory, structuring, tax planning and relationship management. Work our clients actually value, and which offshore processing capacity was never going to deliver.
Within the first six months of the transition, we have already demonstrated an improvement of approximately 10 percentage points in firm-wide margin compared with previous performance, with further improvement expected next year as more of the process moves through the platform and as the AI capability matures.
The additional margin is earmarked for practice growth. We regard the ability to acquire a practice and re-platform its compliance work as the real return on this implementation - the margin improvement on our own book is the starting point, not the objective.
The honest summary is that this is an evolving end-to-end compliance environment. People must support the process throughout as the platform continues to evolve and improve, and we continue to refine where human attention is best applied. But the margin improvement is significant, the workflow is measurably improving, and none of it has come at the expense of quality control.
For GRA, this is as much a growth strategy as a technology programme: reducing preparer time and routine reviewer time across the compliance workflow, building a more scalable operating model, and allowing our New Zealand team to spend more of its time on judgement, advice, client relationships, value-added services and growth.
We believe firms that rebuild their end-to-end compliance workflow around this model early will hold a structural cost advantage over those that do not. That is the position we are working to secure.
“Zato will be like Uber to the CA community. Disruptive, transparent, better.”
Matthew Gilligan · Managing Director, Gilligan Rowe & Associates
This case study reflects GRA’s experience as at September 2026 during an ongoing transition to Zato. GRA expects to revisit the results following a full annual cycle, when further data on preparer time, review effort, capacity and cost can be assessed across a larger completed cohort.
This case study was originally drafted by a director of Gilligan Rowe & Associates and lightly edited by Zato for clarity and publication. The figures and statements above reflect GRA’s own operating experience. The approximately 10 percentage-point improvement in firm-wide margin is based on GRA’s internal assessment against previous performance. Individual outcomes may vary between firms.