Finance & Accounting Lead

Overview

This role sits at the center of a rapidly expanding travel, fintech, and SaaS organization. As revenue evolves beyond subscriptions running through Stripe, the organization needs a dedicated finance and accounting leader to determine how transactions are recognized, build the month-end close that supports reporting, and make the P&L clear and decision-useful for leadership and a board evaluating the business as a SaaS company.

Because finance and accounting has not previously had a dedicated hire, bookkeeping is outsourced and the chart of accounts was built for a software company. Many decisions about how new business lines are recorded remain to be defined.

Responsibilities

• Restructure the P&L so it describes the businesses the organization actually runs, including unit economics per transaction, and own the model that results
• Set the revenue recognition policy across all business verticals
• Oversee the month-end close process
• Own the burn, including policy, categorization, and the gap between P&L expense lines and what actually leaves the bank
• Write accounting requirements for payment and operations products; partner with the Finance Product Lead and engineering to ensure they are built
• Map and close the tax exposure that comes with new business lines
• Serve as the accounting subject-matter expert for internal stakeholders and users
• Be the authority for accounting questions, handling internal and external inquiries

Requirements

• Deep accounting expertise, including owning technical accounting where answers were not available via a playbook
  • Ability to reason from relevant standards rather than precedent
  • Ability to determine appropriate booking treatment when others do not know how something should be recorded
• Experience building the accounting function as the first or earliest accounting hire at a startup
  • Built chart of accounts, close process, and controls rather than inheriting them
• Revenue recognition judgment under ASC 606
  • Experience making gross-vs-net calls
  • Ability to reason through the principal-vs-agent test (not just recite it)
• Payments and marketplace accounting experience
  • Accounting for money flows through the organization rather than to it (e.g., held funds, payouts, chargebacks, interchange, processing fees)
• Requirements writing experience
  • Ability to translate accounting needs into system and ledger requirements and hold the line without needing to own the product roadmap
• Close ownership experience
  • Ability to identify incorrect close outcomes by reviewing results
  • Ownership of month-end close work (not only review)
• Comfort operating without a defined process
  • Ability to pick up unowned work and move quickly

Preferred Qualifications

• Travel tech experience, or any industry where commissions, supplier statements, and trust accounting are normal
• CPA
• Experience participating in an institutional fundraising process and understanding what diligence requires of a set of books
• Experience bringing bookkeeping in-house after replacing an outsourced bookkeeping firm
• Multi-entity and/or multi-currency experience

Compensation & Benefits

• Compensation Range: $150K - $175K
• Competitive salary, equity, and benefits package

Location

Not specified in the provided job description.