Hawkes Bay Airport

The situation.

Hawke's Bay Airport is the third-busiest airport in the North Island. The team is 16 people, including the rescue fire crew.

The finance function ran through one person. Accounts payable, accounts receivable, payroll, month-end – all of it concentrated in a single seat. The structural exposure was obvious: bottlenecks at every month-end, near-impossible leave coverage, no real continuity plan. A senior person planning leave had to schedule around finance deadlines, not the other way around.

The team called this a resilience problem, not a capacity problem. That distinction matters. Adding hours to one person would not have solved it. The risk was the single point of failure, not the workload.

When the airport went to market, value for money was on the criteria list – but so were efficiency, resilience, professionalism, and dedicated support. Admin Army was already on the shortlist via a local HR consultant who was an existing client.

What we changed.

The engagement started at the worst possible time, by design – end of financial year, in the depths of the first COVID-19 lockdown. Stabilising under pressure is the test that matters. If the implementation fell over here, it would have fallen over anywhere.

Irene and Moana led a staggered implementation with documented training plans so both sides knew what was being transferred and when. Inside the first month: Xero and bank feeds set up, the 20th-of-month payment run executed on time, the seam between old and new closed cleanly.

The structural change was not "Admin Army does the airport's bookkeeping". It was that the airport's finance function stopped depending on one person being available. Resilience now lives in the engagement, not in any single seat.

The outcome.

Eighteen months in, three measurable shifts:

• Payroll service levels to employees improved. The flow from timesheet through to payment now runs predictably, with downstream improvements in cash flow and debt collection.
• Accounts payable volume increased markedly with the terminal expansion. The function absorbed it without strain.
• Bad debt on accounts receivable decreased dramatically, visible in End of Year reports.

A fresh set of eyes also surfaced what the in-house arrangement could not. A new payroll system. Online leave applications instead of paper. Improvements neither the airport nor Admin Army had specified at engagement – they fell out of the process review.