Hire Data Engineer for Accounting Firms
Senior, direct, no layers

A accounting firms business usually has the data it needs, but not in one place. Bank feeds and card transactions, payroll runs, and invoicing and bill-pay records live in different systems, reports are rebuilt by hand each month, and decisions are made on numbers nobody fully trusts. When client documents arriving late keeps happening, the cause is rarely a lack of data; it is that the data never gets collected, cleaned, and presented in a form anyone can rely on.

The engagement covers bookkeeping, payroll, tax preparation, and advisory as a data problem: what the business measures, where that data lives, and what decisions it should support. The close calendar drives everything: client documents arriving late, month-end closes compressed into a few days, and tax season swallowing the whole team. Reporting built on that reality gets used in weekly meetings; reporting built on generic metrics gets ignored.

The work is done inside the business's own systems, with definitions agreed before any dashboard is built. A metric means the same thing in every report, because the model defines it once. That discipline is the difference between reporting the team trusts and reporting the team argues with.

The warehouse draws on bank feeds and card transactions, payroll runs, invoicing and bill-pay records, time-tracking entries, and tax-filing status records. Each source is pulled on a schedule, checked for duplicates and missing records, and modelled into tables the business can query, so realisation rate by client and service line, close completion times by month, and documents outstanding per client all read from the same definitions instead of separate extracts.

Day to day, the business already runs on QuickBooks Online (the books), Xero (the books), Karbon (practice workflow), TaxDome (client workflow and portals), and Dext (document capture). Pipelines pull from those sources on a schedule, models define the metrics once, and the reporting layer serves every team from the same definitions.

A sensible first project is one pipeline done properly, often bank feeds and card transactions feeding realisation rate by client and service line, with the team using the resulting report for real decisions before anything else is added. A pipeline that proves itself on one decision earns the trust to carry the rest.

Take bank feeds and card transactions. Today it probably arrives as an export someone cleans by hand. In the pipeline it is pulled on a schedule, checked for missing or duplicate records, and modelled into the same definitions every report uses, so realisation rate by client and service line is a number the team trusts instead of a spreadsheet they debate.

QuickBooks Online handles the books. Xero handles the books. Karbon handles practice workflow. TaxDome handles client workflow and portals. Dext handles document capture.

The measure that matters is use months later. Pipelines still running on schedule, reports still opened weekly, and new sources added without rebuilding the warehouse is the deliverable. Anything that needs its builder to survive was not finished.

That also changes how the business argues: disagreements move from whose spreadsheet is right to what the number means and what to do about it, which is where a accounting firms team's judgement actually adds value. Browse all hire engagements or discuss your data setup directly.