Commercial Cost Accountant

Rakon is a global high‑technology company, a New Zealand-grown success story, and a world leader in advanced frequency control and timing solutions. Our products play a critical role in telecommunications, global positioning, space, and defence applications worldwide.

We are seeking a commercially focused  Commercial Cost Accountant to join our Commercial Business Unit in Auckland.

This is an exciting opportunity for an experienced accounting and finance professional to play a key role in supporting product profitability, pricing decisions, forecasting, and commercial decision-making across the business. Working closely with Commercial, Finance, Operations, Supply Chain, Engineering, and Sales teams, you will provide critical insights that help ensure product costs, margins, and profitability are accurately understood and reflected in business decisions.

Reporting to the  Head of Operations – Commercial BU , you will be responsible for maintaining robust product costing methodologies, analysing cost and margin performance, supporting pricing and business opportunities, and delivering meaningful financial insight to senior stakeholders.

What You'll Be Doing

Product Costing & Cost Analysis

- Maintain and analyse standard product costs, including material, labour, manufacturing overhead, and other cost components.

- Review actual costs against standards and investigate cost variances and performance drivers.

- Analyse changes in BOMs, material pricing, labour assumptions, manufacturing processes, and overhead absorption to assess profitability impacts.

- Partner with Operations, Procurement, Supply Chain, and Engineering teams to improve costing accuracy and cost visibility.

Commercial & Margin Analysis

- Analyse revenue, gross profit, contribution, margin performance, and profitability across products, customers, and markets.

- Provide clear explanations of margin movements and commercial performance trends.

- Support management in establishing and monitoring profitability and margin targets.

- Identify opportunities to improve product and customer profitability.

Pricing & Commercial Decision Support

- Provide financial and cost analysis to support quotations, pricing reviews, commercial negotiations, and new business opportunities.

- Support business cases, scenario modelling, and investment decisions relating to products, customers, and markets.

- Provide commercial insights to support strategic decision-making.

Forecasting, Budgeting & Planning

- Support annual budgets, forecasts, and long-term planning activities.

- Analyse actual versus forecast and budget performance and provide meaningful variance analysis.

- Develop scenario and sensitivity analysis to support management decisions.

Management Reporting & Business Insights

- Prepare and enhance commercial and cost-performance reporting for management.

- Develop KPI reporting across revenue, gross profit, gross margin, ASP, cost movements, and profitability measures.

- Deliver meaningful analysis and commentary that supports executive and management decision-making.

Controls, Data Integrity & Continuous Improvement

- Maintain strong controls over costing and commercial-finance data.

- Reconcile information across financial, commercial, and operational systems.

- Support improvements to costing, forecasting, and reporting methodologies.

- Identify opportunities to automate, standardise, and simplify recurring reporting and analysis.

- Ensure appropriate governance, documentation, and auditability of costing assumptions and methodologies.

What You'll Bring

- Bachelor's degree in Accounting, Finance, Commerce, Business, or a related discipline.

- Professional accounting qualification such as
CA, CPA, CIMA, ACCA, or equivalent (preferred).

- 5+ years' experience in cost accounting, manufacturing finance, management accounting, or commercial finance.

- Strong understanding of standard costing, BOM costing, labour and overhead allocation, inventory valuation, cost absorption, and manufacturing variances.

- Advanced financial analysis capability, including profitability, margin, pricing, and scenario analysis.

- Advanced Microsoft Excel skills, including complex formulas, PivotTables, and financial modelling.

- Experience with Power BI or similar reporting and business intelligence tools.

- Strong understanding of accounting principles, financial controls, reconciliations, and data governance.

- Experience working with ERP systems, preferably SAP.

- Strong analytical, problem-solving, stakeholder management, and business partnering skills.

Desirable

- Experience with SAP S/4HANA.

- Exposure to multi-site or global manufacturing environments.

- Knowledge of data migration, systems integration, and transformation projects.

- Experience with Power Query, DAX, SQL, or reporting automation tools.

- Understanding of FX impacts and global supply chain dynamics.

- Experience using AI tools to support analysis, reporting, or process improvement.

Why Join Us?

At Rakon, we value people who challenge the status quo and continuously look for ways to improve our products, processes, and business performance.

This role offers the opportunity to influence pricing, profitability, forecasting, and commercial decision-making while working within a globally recognised technology company. You'll work closely with senior stakeholders across multiple business functions and play a key role in supporting strategic and operational decision-making.

If you're looking for a role where you can combine your costing, commercial finance, and business partnering expertise to make a real impact, we'd love to hear from you.

Applications will be reviewed as they are received, so apply now!