Why This Role Exists
We want a financial partner — someone who can own the books and help us make better decisions with them. Not just a bookkeeper. Not just a close-the-books accountant. Someone who sees the business through the financials and can tell us when a deal pencils, when a margin has slipped, when an account needs cleaning up, and when we're about to do something dumb with our cash.
The founder currently fills this seat while running the business. That is not sustainable, and it is also not the best use of either of our time. We are looking for someone who can take this over, in partnership with the AI tooling we have already built, and deliver a full controller's output in roughly 20 to 25 hours per month.
About Pirani Life
Pirani Life is a drinkware brand based in the Asheville, NC area. We design, import, and sell insulated tumblers and water bottles through our website, Amazon, wholesale accounts, festivals, and tradeshows. We source most of our product from a single factory overseas, manage a large prepayment relationship with that factory, and operate a warehouse locally. Our ERP is NetSuite. We are a small team with ambitious plans — a new bottle program launching this quarter, a target of doubling the business, and preparing our financials to be hire-ready and sale-ready in the next 12 to 18 months.
The Role
This is a fractional controller position, roughly 20 to 25 hours per month on average, with some flex both ways. The first 2 to 3 months will require more time as you work through initial cleanup and ramp on our systems. You will be the highest-level financial person in the company.
The founder handles treasury (sending wires, managing bank access, executing payments) and retains all purchasing and strategic decisions. You own everything else on the financial side — tactical, cyclical, and strategic.
A critical, non-negotiable requirement: you must be comfortable using AI as your primary working tool. We use Claude (Anthropic's AI assistant) with direct, authenticated access to our NetSuite system. It creates journal entries, enters vendor bills, pulls reports, reconciles vendor prepayments, matches freight invoices to receipts, builds scenario models, and handles routine bookkeeping. Your job is not data entry. Your job is to direct the AI, verify its work, question its assumptions, and build processes that make the whole system better over time.
This is how 20–25 hours a month is realistic. Without AI, this role is a 40-hour-a-week job. With AI, a sharp controller can compress the same work into a fraction of the time — and spend the rest of their bandwidth on judgment, strategy, and process improvement. If you are nervous about AI or would rather do it all yourself the old way, this is not the role for you.
What You OwnStrategic & Analytical (the work that isn't on a schedule)
Much of what we need is project-based and event-driven, not monthly-cycle work:
- Scenario modeling for pricing, deals, and partnerships. Example: a TV shopping network offered us a feature last week; we needed to know in a day whether it was profitable at 30 / 40 / 50% off, across 4 sizes, with real landed cost and shipping assumptions. You should be able to build that model.
- Margin and unit economics analysis by SKU, channel, and deal — proactively flag problems (a size priced at the wrong MSRP, a channel whose blended margin is underwater, a customer segment whose CAC is upside-down).
- Cash flow planning around major events — product launches, seasonal inventory builds, large wires to the factory, event seasons.
- Hire-ready and sale-ready financials. Build toward the day a due diligence team opens our books and finds no surprises.
- Process and systems architecture — fix broken workflows at the root. Inventory adjustments, landed cost allocation, intercompany accounting, Amazon reconciliation. Design the right way, document it, then make the AI execute it consistently.
- Business partnering — work with operations on purchasing decisions, with sales on deal structures, with ownership on cash flow choices.
Monthly Close
- Drive the monthly close: reconciliations, accruals, journal entries, financial statement review.
- Review bank and credit card statements and confirm everything ties to NetSuite.
- Reconcile accrued purchases so every freight bill and vendor invoice ties back to the right inventory receipt.
- Manage intercompany accounting between the operating company and its management subsidiary.
- Review inventory adjustments (damaged goods, Amazon shrinkage, warehouse count variances).
- Prepare a monthly P&L review with variance commentary for the founder — not just numbers, but insight.
- Own the balance sheet. Every account should have a reconciliation or a documented reason.
- Flag anything that looks wrong: unexpected cost shifts, inventory valuation issues, aging payables, unapplied cash.
Day-to-Day Tactical
Things that come up during the month. We need someone we can ping and get a real answer from:
- A sales order was supposed to be a nonprofit donation but was billed at full retail — fix it.
- A refund went through by accident — figure out what happened, what needs to be reversed, and what the correct booking should have been.
- A freight bill from ocean or domestic trucking arrived — match it to the right inventory receipt and allocate as landed cost.
- The bookkeeper has a question about how to code something unusual — answer it and document the rule for next time.
- A vendor sent a statement that doesn't match our books — reconcile it, email them back, close the loop.
- Enter and approve vendor bills, apply vendor prepayments against open bills, keep the AP picture clean.
Sales Tax & Compliance
- Oversee automated sales tax filing for states where we have nexus (TaxJar AutoFile).
- Clear phantom tax balances created by marketplace-facilitated sales (Amazon, Meta).
- Keep tax collection settings aligned with our filing obligations as we expand into new states.
- Support year-end tax prep and work with our external CPA on returns.
Bookkeeper Oversight
- An outsourced bookkeeper handles sales recording and basic bank reconciliations.
- You review their work, answer their questions, and make sure the general ledger is clean before you close the month.
What You Don't Own
- Treasury. The founder sends all wires and payments. This is a deliberate separation of duties.
- Purchasing decisions. Operations and sales decide what to buy. You validate the financial side and flag consequences.
- Warehouse operations. The warehouse team receives goods and enters receipts. You review, not receive.
- Order processing, marketing, or creative. Those belong to their respective departments.
Working with AI (This Is Not Optional)
We have built a system where an AI assistant works directly inside our NetSuite environment. Today it can pull any data on demand, create and post journal entries and vendor bills, record payments, match freight invoices to inventory receipts, build reconciliation workbooks, apply vendor prepayments against bills, run SuiteQL queries, model pricing scenarios, and maintain a full audit trail of every change it makes.
Your role is to be the human in the loop. You review what the AI produces, ask hard questions, catch mistakes, and push it to build better processes. Think of it as a very fast, very thorough staff accountant who never forgets anything but needs your judgment to know what matters and what's wrong.
Concrete example: in one recent working session, in about an hour, we reconciled a supplier's entire payment ledger against NetSuite, fixed mispriced MSRPs across 13 SKUs, modeled four discount scenarios for a television shopping deal across four product sizes with real landed cost, drafted a response to the partner, reviewed a stack of resumes, and updated a job description. Without AI, that is a two-day project. With AI, it is the right work done in the right amount of time.
What We're Looking ForRequired
- 5+ years in accounting or finance, with at least 2 years at the controller or senior accountant level.
- NetSuite experience (comfortable with the general ledger, vendor bills, item receipts, and landed cost). Strong candidates without NetSuite who have comparable ERP depth (SAP, Sage Intacct, Dynamics) will be considered if they can ramp quickly.
- Solid understanding of inventory accounting, cost of goods sold, and landed cost.
- Comfortable with AI tools and excited to use them daily, not just occasionally. If AI is not already part of your workflow, please tell us why you would change that for this role.
- Based in the Asheville, NC area and available for in-person meetings at least monthly.
- Strong opinions about process. You see a messy workflow and want to fix it, not work around it.
- Available during normal business hours for ad-hoc questions, not just at night or on weekends.
Nice to Have
- Experience with consumer goods / physical product brands — inventory, COGS, freight, landed cost, multi-channel sales.
- Experience with e-commerce (Shopify, Amazon FBA, marketplace facilitators).
- Familiarity with international purchasing, vendor prepayments, and freight accounting.
- Experience with sales tax automation tools (TaxJar or similar).
- CPA or equivalent credential.
- Experience preparing a company for due diligence, an audit, or a sale.
What Success Looks LikeFirst 30 Days
- Understand the chart of accounts, balance sheet, open issues, and existing AI workflows.
- Review the NetSuite change log and the Controller folder of ongoing projects.
- Complete your first month-end close with AI assistance.
First 90 Days
- Monthly close runs in under 6 hours of your time, with the AI doing the heavy lifting.
- Every balance sheet account is reconciled or has a documented plan.
- Freight matching is airtight. No orphaned bills, no missing landed costs, no double-bookings.
- Vendor prepayment balance is reconciled and stays that way.
- Day-to-day tactical requests are handled same-day or next-day, not accumulating in a backlog.
Ongoing
- The founder stops worrying about the books and focuses on growing the business.
- When we need a scenario modeled — a new deal, a pricing change, a cash flow planning exercise — you can turn it around in hours, not weeks.
- The financial data is trustworthy enough to make real business decisions from, and you are often the one flagging which decisions to make.
- When we are ready for a due diligence process, our books are already ready.
Job Type: Part-time
Pay: $50.00 - $100.00 per hour
Expected hours: No less than 6 per week
Benefits:
Application Question(s):
- Have you worked with a small business before?
- Please share your experience with Shopify and Netsuite or other similar ERP's.
Work Location: Remote
