Bookkeeper & Business Operations Manager
QuickBooks · Job Costing · Administration · Construction Coordination — Cedar Rapids, Iowa
Reports to
Owner / Managing Member
Hours
Part-time — minimum 20 hours per week, up to 30
Work arrangement
Semi-remote; at least two days per week in the Cedar Rapids office
Team size
Small. You will be one of a handful of people running everything.
The Role
We develop and build small multifamily housing in Cedar Rapids — 4-plexes, 3-plexes, and townhomes — held as rental units across several affiliated ownership entities. We move fast, we run multiple projects at once, and we operate with a very small team.
This role is the operational spine of the business. You will keep the books, run accounts payable and job costing in QuickBooks, manage the administrative machinery of several entities, and coordinate active construction projects by phone and email. The owner is in the field and negotiating deals; you are the person who knows where every dollar went, what every sub is scheduled to do next, and where every document lives.
The variety is the job, not a side effect of it. In a single day you may reconcile an account, code a stack of invoices to the right job and cost category, assemble a bank draw, chase a subcontractor for a start date, order a trim package, file a permit application, and update the master schedule. If moving between finance, administration, and construction in the same hour sounds energizing rather than chaotic, this is a good fit. If it sounds like too many hats, it is not.
Primary Focus Areas
1. Bookkeeping and Job Costing — QuickBooks
- Full-cycle bookkeeping. Maintain the books for multiple related entities in QuickBooks. Reconcile bank and credit card accounts, manage the chart of accounts, and keep clean records that hold up at year end and hand off cleanly to the CPA.
- Accounts payable. Receive, verify, code, and enter every invoice. Confirm billings against contract values and approved change orders before anything is paid. Route for approval, issue payment, and track credits and retainage.
- Job costing. Assign every cost to the correct project and cost code so we can see, at any moment, what a building has actually cost versus what it was budgeted to cost. This is the number the whole business steers on.
- Multi-entity discipline. Keep costs correctly assigned across affiliated LLCs. Vendors regularly bill the wrong entity or the wrong project — catching that is part of the daily work.
- Budget maintenance. Own the live budget workbook for each project. Replace estimates with awarded numbers as bids come in, project cost-to-complete, track contingency, and flag variances early enough that we can act on them.
2. Construction Draws and Cash Management
- Draw packages. Assemble and submit construction draws to lenders — draw forms, updated budgets, and supporting invoices. Track each loan’s balance, accrued interest, and remaining availability, and report status after every funding.
- Cash flow. Maintain rolling cash forecasts across entities, prepare periodic balance summaries for ownership, and coordinate transfers, distributions, and wires within bank limits and verification procedures.
- Banking relationships. Serve as the working contact for our lenders — account setup, draw administration, and routine requests.
3. Administration and Organizational Management
- Document control. Own the filing system. Bids, contracts, change orders, invoices, insurance certificates, plans, permits, and closing documents — organized so anyone can find them, not just you.
- Systems and process. Build and improve the routines that keep a fast, small company from dropping things. Where a process does not exist yet, create it.
- Priority management. Maintain and circulate a running priority list to ownership so nothing time-sensitive goes quiet. Track open items to closure without being asked twice.
- Insurance and risk. Bind builder’s risk before loan closings, coordinate annual policy review, and keep certificates current.
- Permits and filings. Manage building and site permit applications and related municipal paperwork; coordinate platting and addressing with the civil engineer.
4. Construction Coordination — From the Desk
This is a communication and coordination role, not a field supervision role. You will not be running crews on site. You will be the person who makes sure the right people know the right things at the right time.
- Master schedules. Build and maintain a schedule for each active project. Publish updates to subcontractors and share progress reporting with lenders and ownership.
- Trade sequencing. Coordinate rough-ins, drywall, trim, cabinets, countertops, paint, and flooring so crews arrive to work that is genuinely ready for them.
- Subcontractor communication. Confirm start dates, communicate site access, lockbox codes, material staging, utility turn-ons, and dumpster service ahead of scheduled work. Follow up relentlessly and pleasantly.
- Bids and contracts. Issue invitations to bid with plan sets, compare proposals on scope as well as price, recommend awards, and draft subcontractor agreements and change orders.
- Materials and long-lead items. Order trim, doors, windows, cabinets, and appliances against lead times; track deliveries to the correct site and entity.
- Selections and specifications. Coordinate kitchen and bath layouts and finish packages with designers and suppliers, sourced to budget.
- Cost challenge. Question pricing that looks wrong. Finding a better source on a line item is a normal part of the week, not an exception.
Hours and Work Arrangement
This is a part-time position: a minimum of 20 hours per week, with room to grow to 30 as the workload warrants. The schedule is flexible week to week, but the hours need to be real and reasonably consistent — subcontractors, suppliers, and lenders operate on business hours, and this role has to be reachable during them.
The work is semi-remote. You will spend at least two days per week in our Cedar Rapids office; the balance can be done from wherever you work best. Certain things — check runs, mail, document handling, and working sessions with the owner — happen in the office, so full remote is not an option.
Who Succeeds Here
The technical skills matter, but temperament is what will actually determine whether this works. We are looking for someone who is:
- Incredibly flexible. Priorities shift daily. The person who needs a fixed job description and a predictable week will be miserable here.
- Resourceful. When you hit something you have never done before — a new filing, an unfamiliar form, a vendor problem with no obvious owner — you figure it out and move, rather than waiting for direction.
- Driven by getting it right. You care about accuracy in a way that is a little bit personal. A miscoded invoice or an unreconciled account bothers you until it is fixed.
- Built for many moving pieces. You can hold a dozen open threads across several projects and entities without losing any of them, and you know which one is actually urgent.
- Unbothered by wearing every hat. Some days you are the accountant, some days the scheduler, some days the person tracking down a missing bill of sale. You should find that satisfying rather than exhausting.
- Self-motivated. Nobody will be assigning you a task list each morning. You will build your own and be trusted to execute it.
- Energized by a small, fast team. Decisions happen quickly, ownership is direct, and there is no layer of management between you and the work. That means real influence and no place to hide.
Qualifications
Required
- Demonstrated bookkeeping experience with QuickBooks, including AP, reconciliations, and month-end close.
- Working knowledge of job costing — assigning costs to projects and cost codes, and reporting against budget.
- Strong spreadsheet skills. You will build and maintain the budget workbooks that drive spending decisions.
- Clear, professional written communication. Much of this job is email that has to land correctly with a bank officer, a supplier, and a framing crew on the same afternoon.
- Real organizational discipline across many simultaneous threads.
- Comfort holding people to commitments, chasing paperwork, and pushing back on pricing without escalating every issue to the owner.
Strongly Preferred
- Construction or real estate development bookkeeping experience, especially with multiple entities.
- Familiarity with construction lending and draw administration.
- Experience with construction contracts, change orders, and retainage.
- Familiarity with municipal permitting processes, ideally in Cedar Rapids or Linn County.
- Enough plan-reading literacy to catch a problem before materials are ordered.
Tools
QuickBooks · Excel and Google Sheets · Google Workspace (Gmail, Drive, Calendar) · scheduling software · online banking and construction-loan portals · municipal permitting systems · electronic signature platforms.
What This Job Is Not
- Not property management. Watts Group manages our completed rental units; this role does not handle tenants, leasing, or maintenance calls.
- Not field supervision. You coordinate construction by phone and email from the office, not by running crews on site.
- Not a narrow accounting seat. If you want to do only books and nothing else, this will frustrate you.
How Performance Is Measured
- Books current and accurate, with clean reconciliations and no year-end scramble.
- Job cost reporting that tells us the true position of every project at any moment.
- Draws submitted and funded on schedule, never stalled by an incomplete package.
- Projects delivered at or under budget, with variances surfaced early rather than discovered at completion.
- Subcontractors arriving to ready work; schedule slippage measured in days, not weeks.
- Ownership and lenders who feel informed without having to ask.
Why This Job Is Worth Taking
You will see whole projects from acquisition through completion, not one slice of one phase. The portfolio is active and growing, with multiple buildings under construction at once and additional lots entitled for future phases. Because the team is small, your work is visible and your judgment carries weight immediately — there is no queue to get into and no committee to convince.
You will also have genuine autonomy. The owner approves spending and sets direction; how the work gets organized, tracked, and executed is yours. And because the role is part-time and partly remote, it suits someone who wants substantive, senior-level work without a forty-hour desk commitment.
To apply, send a resume and a short note about a time you inherited a mess and organized it.
Pay: $30.00 - $40.00 per hour
Work Location: Hybrid remote in Cedar Rapids, IA 52405
