Accounting Services Director

Why accounting is an enterprise value job

Every client we serve is building toward one thing: a business that's worth more because a buyer, a lender or an investor can trust its numbers. The arithmetic is simple.

Our fractional CFOs work on earnings and growth. Your team owns the other two terms: quality and risk. A buyer discounts whatever they can't verify. A Shopify clearing account nobody has tied out, inventory that's never been validated against the books, a loan with no schedule, prepaids sitting in expense. Each one is information risk, and in a sale or a raise, information risk becomes valuation risk.

So when your team closes the month properly, you aren't just producing a report. You're protecting the multiple. That's how we want this role to think about the work, and it's how you'll teach your team to think about it.

• Bank recs done, every account, every month
• Month-end reconciled and signed off, on a close calendar people can plan around
• Inventory validated, loans scheduled, prepaids and accruals handled
• Shopify, Amazon and payment clearing accounts tied back to the general ledger
• Working papers that hold up to an auditor, a lender or a buyer's due diligence team

About the role

We have a team of about 8 to 10 accountants and bookkeepers, and we're growing really fast. We need someone to lead, coach, train and manage that team, and to own our accounting processes end to end.

You'll be the senior accounting authority at Eightx. You'll write the SOPs, set the quality bar, solve the genuinely hard problems (leases, equity transactions, multi-currency, inventory), and be available to your team, our CFOs and our clients when something gets complicated. You'll jump on calls with clients and walk them through issues in plain English.

You'll work hand in hand with our fractional CFOs. They turn clean books into decisions. You make sure the books are clean enough to decide on.

What you'll do

Lead the team

• Manage, coach and develop our accountants and bookkeepers, and help us hire the next ones
• Review work before it reaches a CFO or a client, give direct feedback, and hold the standard
• Plan capacity across the portfolio so deadlines are met without heroics
• Run the accounting team's weekly meeting, clear blockers, and fix recurring problems at the root

Own the close

• Own month-end across every client, closed accurately within two to ten business days
• Sign off on close files, reconciliations and working papers
• Set and enforce standards for balance sheet accounts: fixed assets, loans, prepaids, accruals, deferred revenue
• Lead variance review across revenue streams (Shopify, Amazon, wholesale) and expense lines, and explain anything that looks wrong before a client asks
• Coordinate year-end with tax accountants and CPA firms

Build the system

• Write and maintain the SOPs, checklists and close calendar the whole team runs on
• Standardize charts of accounts, working paper templates, weekly flash reports and monthly packages
• Find where automation and AI can take work off the team, and make it happen with our AI team

Solve the hard problems

• Lease accounting, equity transactions (SAFEs, convertibles, new rounds), intercompany and multi-entity work
• Multi-currency: FX revaluation, unrealized gains and losses, cross-currency reconciliations
• Inventory and COGS: reconciliations, landed cost, year-end adjustments
• Sales tax, VAT and nexus questions across the US, UK and EU, researched and escalated to the right people

Be in front of clients

• Act as the senior accounting contact for clients and their CFOs
• Join client calls, explain complex issues simply, and follow up with clear notes and action items
• Flag risks early. If something is going to be late or wrong, the CFO and the client hear it from you first

What you must have

• 7+ years in accounting, including 3+ years leading a team of accountants or bookkeepers and reviewing their work
• Multi-client experience: public practice, an outsourced accounting or client accounting services firm, or a controller seat across several entities
• Deep technical accounting: accrual-basis accounting, leases, equity transactions, deferred revenue, FX revaluation
• Strong Xero and QuickBooks Online skills
• Ecommerce accounting experience: Shopify, Amazon Seller or Vendor Central, and multi-currency
• A record of building processes and SOPs that other people actually follow
• Fluent business English, written and spoken, and you're comfortable on camera with clients
• The ability to coach and empathize. You grow people by teaching them, not by redoing their work
• You can be based anywhere in the world, with enough overlap with North American business hours to join client calls and lead a team across time zones

Nice to have

• CPA, CA or ACCA
• Audit, quality of earnings or due diligence experience
• NetSuite, A2X, Dext, Hubdoc, Bill.com, Rippling or Gusto
• You've grown an accounting team before and know what breaks at 10 people and at 25

What you'll get in return

• A competitive salary benchmarked to your market, plus a performance bonus. We share the range on the first call
• Fully remote, from anywhere in the world, on a global team: our HQ and a managing partner are in Melbourne, and the team is spread across Canada, the US, England and Switzerland
• Generous time off, plus a company-wide shutdown between Christmas and New Year
• A leadership seat in a firm that's growing fast, with a real path to partner
• Work across a portfolio of ecommerce and consumer brands doing up to $150M, so you'll see more in a year than most controllers see in five

How to apply

Apply through the posting with your CV. Here's what happens next:

• A short video (2 to 3 minutes). Tell us about a close you inherited in a mess and what you did to fix it. Then tell us about one accounting problem you solved that changed what an auditor, a lender or a buyer thought of the business.
• A screening call with our team
• A practical review. We hand you an anonymized close file and ask what you'd sign off, what you'd send back, and why
• Meet the founder and one of our CFOs, then an offer

You'll hear back either way.