About the Company
We are a growing field-service company serving commercial petroleum and fueling facilities throughout the greater Houston and Southeast Texas area. Our operations include service technicians, parts and equipment purchasing, vehicle and truck inventory, customer invoicing, field service work, and repair projects.
We are looking for an experienced, hands-on accountant to take ownership of our day-to-day internal accounting and help us build stronger financial and operational controls as the company continues to grow.
This is not primarily a tax-accounting position. We already work with an outside CPA for tax preparation and tax-related matters. This position will focus on internal accounting, financial reporting, job costing, inventory control, cash management, and giving ownership a clear understanding of where the company is making and spending money.
Our current office is located in Conroe, Texas. We are also considering relocating or expanding our service operations into a warehouse/office facility in the Houston area. Applicants must be willing and able to work from either location if our primary service office moves to Houston.
What You Will Be Responsible For
The person in this position will have substantial ownership of the company's internal accounting processes.
Responsibilities will include:
- Maintain and reconcile company bank accounts and business credit cards.
- Maintain accurate books in QuickBooks Online and perform regular month-end closes.
- Categorize and reconcile expenses, vendor purchases, payroll, taxes, transfers, credit-card activity, and deposits.
- Reconcile customer payments and bank deposits against invoices and the company's field-service/job-management system.
- Maintain accounts receivable aging and actively identify overdue, partially paid, unapplied, or otherwise unresolved customer balances.
- Maintain accounts payable and monitor upcoming vendor obligations.
- Track company cash flow and prepare short-term cash-flow forecasts.
- Produce monthly profit-and-loss statements, balance sheets, cash-flow reports, and management reports for ownership.
- Identify accounting discrepancies, duplicate transactions, missing documentation, unusual expenses, and areas where financial controls need improvement.
Job Costing and Profitability
A major responsibility of this position will be developing accurate job-costing and profitability reporting.
You will work with our existing service-management and accounting systems to determine the actual profitability of individual jobs, customers, technicians, and service categories.
This includes:
- Match parts and materials purchased or used to individual customer jobs whenever possible.
- Compare actual parts cost against the amount billed to the customer.
- Track technician labor cost against labor revenue.
- Develop loaded hourly employee-cost calculations that include wages, payroll taxes, and other appropriate labor costs.
- Calculate gross profit and contribution margin by job.
- Produce profitability reports by technician, customer, service category, and time period.
- Identify completed jobs that are missing parts, labor, invoices, or other required financial information.
- Identify work or materials that may have been performed or used but not properly billed.
- Help ownership establish appropriate pricing and markup based on actual costs.
The goal is to be able to clearly answer questions such as:
What did this job actually cost us? What did we bill? What did we collect? What was the resulting profit?
Inventory and Parts Control
Inventory control will be an important part of this role.
Our technicians carry parts inventory in service trucks, and the company also maintains parts in a central storage area. We are considering moving into a larger warehouse/service facility, and this position would play a major role in establishing the accounting and inventory-control procedures for that operation.
Responsibilities may include:
- Establish and maintain an inventory system for warehouse and technician truck stock.
- Track parts from purchase and receiving through warehouse inventory, technician assignment, job usage, return, warranty, and customer billing.
- Reconcile physical inventory against accounting and service records.
- Establish part numbers, inventory locations, costs, and appropriate documentation procedures.
- Conduct or coordinate periodic cycle counts and physical inventory counts.
- Identify missing, obsolete, duplicated, excess, or slow-moving inventory.
- Monitor purchasing patterns and vendor costs.
- Compare inventory purchased against inventory consumed and billed.
- Help establish controls for transferring parts between the warehouse and service trucks.
Management Reporting
Ownership wants more than standard bookkeeping reports. The person in this role should be able to turn accounting data into useful business information.
We would expect regular reporting on items such as:
- Monthly revenue and expenses
- Operating profit
- Gross margin
- Accounts receivable aging
- Accounts payable
- Cash balances and cash-flow forecast
- Parts purchases
- Parts margin
- Inventory value
- Payroll and labor cost
- Cost and profitability by technician
- Revenue and profitability by customer
- Profitability by individual job
- Unbilled or underbilled jobs
- Outstanding customer payments
- Major expense changes or unusual transactions
- Other financial trends requiring management attention
You should be comfortable investigating numbers rather than simply reporting them.
Initial Priorities
The successful candidate will initially be expected to perform a thorough review of our current accounting and operational processes.
During the first several months, priorities will include:
- Reconcile existing bank and credit-card activity.
- Review the accuracy and organization of QuickBooks Online.
- Reconcile customer invoices, payments, deposits, and outstanding receivables.
- Review existing vendor and expense classifications.
- Determine our normalized monthly operating expenses and cash requirements.
- Establish reliable job-costing procedures.
- Evaluate our current inventory and parts-management process.
- Establish truck and warehouse inventory controls.
- Identify weaknesses, inefficiencies, missing controls, or accounting problems and recommend improvements.
- Develop a consistent monthly financial reporting package for ownership.
We are specifically looking for someone who can walk into an accounting environment that needs improvement, determine what is missing, and help build the systems necessary to make it accurate and dependable.
Qualifications
Required:
- Bachelor's degree in Accounting, Finance, or a closely related field.
- Strong working knowledge of general accounting principles.
- Experience with account reconciliations, general ledger accounting, and month-end close.
- Strong proficiency with QuickBooks Online or comparable accounting software.
- Strong Microsoft Excel skills.
- Ability to analyze large amounts of transaction data and identify discrepancies.
- Strong attention to detail and organizational skills.
- Ability to work independently and take ownership of accounting functions.
- Comfortable working directly with company ownership and explaining financial information clearly.
- Willingness to work in person in Conroe and, if company operations relocate or expand, commute to a Houston-area warehouse/office.
Strongly Preferred:
- 3+ years of accounting experience.
- Experience in a service, construction, distribution, mechanical, electrical, HVAC, petroleum-equipment, automotive, industrial, or similar field-based business.
- Experience with job costing.
- Experience with inventory accounting and physical inventory controls.
- Experience reconciling multiple bank accounts and high-volume business credit cards.
- Experience with payroll accounting.
- Experience with accounts receivable collections and aging.
- Experience establishing accounting procedures or cleaning up an existing accounting system.
- Experience working with field-service or job-management software.
CPA certification is welcome but not required. Practical experience with job costing, inventory, operational accounting, and financial controls is more important for this position.
What We Are Looking For
This position is best suited for someone who enjoys understanding how a business actually works.
We do not want someone who only enters transactions and waits until month-end to run a report. We want someone who notices when:
- a $5,000 part was purchased but cannot be tied to inventory or a customer job;
- a completed job has not been invoiced;
- a customer invoice has remained unpaid for 90 days;
- a technician used materials that were not billed;
- the physical inventory does not match the accounting records;
- a vendor's pricing has increased;
- expenses have unexpectedly increased;
- deposits do not reconcile with customer payments; or
- the company's reported profit does not make sense compared with its cash flow.
You should be naturally inclined to investigate those issues and resolve them.
Work Environment and Location
This is an in-person position.
The company's current administrative office is in Conroe, TX. Our service operations primarily support customers throughout the greater Houston area, and we are evaluating a future warehouse/office location in Houston.
The selected candidate must be comfortable working from the Conroe office initially and must be willing to commute to a Houston-area location if our accounting/service operations are later moved to or consolidated into a new warehouse facility.
Some periodic travel between company locations may also be required for inventory counts, operational reviews, or other accounting responsibilities.
Compensation
$66,000–$80,000 per year, depending on experience and qualifications.
Candidates with substantial experience in job costing, inventory accounting, operational accounting, or building accounting systems for a growing service business may be considered toward the upper end of the range.
Why This Role Matters
This is an opportunity to become the primary internal accounting resource for a growing company rather than one member of a large accounting department.
The person we hire will have direct access to ownership and significant influence over how the company's accounting, inventory, job-costing, and financial reporting systems are built going forward.
For the right person, this role offers the opportunity to take ownership of a company's financial operations, identify problems, build better processes, and directly see the impact of their work on the business.
Pay: $66,000.00 - $80,000.00 per year
Work Location: In person
