When your organisation manages multiple entities, significant commercial operations, and intergenerational accountability to whānau, financial governance isn’t just about compliance—it’s about building the infrastructure for long-term prosperity.
We work with iwi holdings, trust boards, and large Pacific organisations across New Zealand. These entities often manage complex structures: parent trusts, trading subsidiaries, property portfolios, and charitable operations, all while balancing cultural governance with commercial imperatives.
Here’s what sophisticated financial governance looks like in practice.
The Challenge: Many iwi organisations operate through multiple legal entities—a parent trust, trading companies, property holding entities, charitable trusts. Each has its own reporting requirements, but your board needs to see the whole picture.
What Excellence Looks Like:
Why It Matters: Your kaumātua and trustees need to understand total asset position, cross-entity risk exposure, and whether your commercial entities are generating sufficient returns to fund your kaupapa.
The Challenge: Larger Māori organisations (those with operating expenditure over $2M or assets over $10M) must prepare financial statements using Public Benefit Entity (PBE) accounting standards at Tier 3 level. Many boards don’t realize the reporting complexity this entails.
What Excellence Looks Like:
Why It Matters: Non-compliance risks qualification of your audit opinion, which can trigger funder reviews, stakeholder concern, and regulatory attention from Charities Services or the Commerce Commission.
The Challenge: Strategy documents often sit separate from financial reality. Boards approve ambitious 10-year plans without seeing the capital requirements, cash flow implications, or return assumptions tested.
What Excellence Looks Like:
Why It Matters: Your people expect intergenerational stewardship. That means knowing not just what you’ll spend this year, but whether your asset base will grow to support your mokopuna 50 years from now.
The Challenge: For entities managing significant Treaty settlement assets or receiving substantial Crown funding, audit season shouldn’t be a scramble. Yet many organisations still treat it as an annual crisis.
What Excellence Looks Like:
Why It Matters: Your audit should confirm excellence, not uncover problems. A clean audit with no management letter points signals to funders, partners, and whānau that your systems are sound.
The Challenge: Trustees bring deep cultural knowledge and governance wisdom, but aren’t always accountants. Yet they receive 40-page finance reports full of technical detail and minimal context.
What Excellence Looks Like: A monthly Board Finance Pack that includes:
Why It Matters: Good reporting enables your trustees to exercise their governance duties with confidence. They can ask the right questions, spot risks early, and make informed decisions about resource allocation.
The entities that thrive over decades share common characteristics:
Financial excellence in Māori and Pacific organisations isn’t about adopting corporate practices wholesale. It’s about building systems that serve your kaupapa—systems that protect your assets, demonstrate accountability to whānau, satisfy funders and regulators, and enable your governors to make decisions with confidence.
Ask yourself:
If you answered “no” or “not sure” to any of these, your financial governance infrastructure may need strengthening.
Need support with financial governance, audit preparation, or PBE standards compliance? We partner with iwi trust boards and large Māori & Pacific organisations across New Zealand to build financial systems that serve intergenerational prosperity.