POSITION DESCRIPTION
Fractional Manufacturing Controller
Three-Month Contract Engagement | Chandler, Arizona | Onsite
Independent contractor (1099) or through your own firm. Not a W-2 position.
Three months, with a defined deliverable set. Extension possible but not assumed.
Commitment
16 to 24 hours per week, onsite (roughly 210 to 310 hours over the term). Scheduling is flexible within business hours, but count weeks and month-end run at the top of that range.
Location
Onsite at our Chandler, AZ manufacturing facility, including regular time in the warehouse and on the production floor. This is not a remote engagement.
Rate
Commensurate with experience
Reports to Chief Financial Officer. Works With Staff Accountant, Director of Operations, Director of Quality, Director of IT, Warehouse Manager
ABOUT ADEPT LIFE SCIENCES
Adept Life Sciences is a contract manufacturer of nutraceutical and dietary supplement products based in Chandler, Arizona. We produce liquids, powders, capsules, tablets, and chews for consumer brands under cGMP conditions, running weigh and blend, encapsulation, tableting, and multiple packaging lines out of a single facility.
We are a lean operation. Roughly thirty-five people across production, quality, warehouse, maintenance, and commercial functions. That means the person in this seat gets real access, real influence, and very little bureaucracy.
WHY THIS ROLE EXISTS
Our accounting function is staffed at the transactional level and handles it well. What we do not have is senior financial leadership in the building, and it is starting to cost us.
We know what our revenue is. We do not have the confidence we want in what each production lot actually costs us to make. Labor is captured in a scheduling system, material consumption lives in batch records and purchasing documents, and third-party lab testing arrives as separate invoices. Nobody has pulled those threads together into a repeatable monthly job cost report, so pricing decisions and customer profitability conversations are running on estimates rather than numbers we can defend.
We run QuickBooks Online. It handles the general ledger fine and gives us nothing on manufacturing cost. There is no native work-in-process, no standard costing, and no lot-level absorption, so the costing layer has to be designed and built outside the GL and then tied back to it every month.Knowing how to do that well is the core of this engagement.
Inventory is the other half of the same problem. What the system says we hold and what is physically on the racks are not always the same number, and that difference lands in cost of goods sold whether we look at it or not. We need someone senior reviewing and signing off on inventory every month, and we need that person in the warehouse when counts happen rather than reading about them afterward.
We are bringing in a controller for three months to fix that, tighten the close, and leave behind a process the existing team can run without you.
SCOPE OF THE ENGAGEMENT
1. Month-End Close and Internal Controls
- Build and own a documented close calendar with named owners and hard cutoff dates.
- Review and approve reconciliations, accruals, and journal entries prepared by the staff accountant.
- Establish balance sheet account reconciliation standards and get every material account supported.
- Assess segregation of duties across cash, purchasing, and payroll, and close the gaps that matter.
- Reduce close cycle time to a target we agree on in the first two weeks.
2. Job Costing Buildout
- Design a lot-level job costing model that ties direct labor, materials consumption, third-party lab testing, and manufacturing overhead to each production lot.
- Establish the burden rate methodology, including how indirect labor, sanitation, maintenance, and unallocated production time get absorbed.
- Reconcile the source systems (labor capture, batch records, purchasing and receiving, and third-party lab invoices) and resolve the identifier mismatches between them.
- Build the costing subledger outside the general ledger and establish how it ties back to QuickBooks Online each period.
- Produce a cost-per-unit view by product and by customer that finance, sales, and operations all agree on.
- Document the model in enough detail that the cost accountant and staff accountant can run it monthly without you.
3. Monthly Inventory Review and Cycle Count Oversight
- Perform a documented monthly inventory review: sign off on the subledger-to-general-ledger reconciliation, work through the variance detail, and approve adjustments before they post.
- Be in the warehouse. Attend and oversee inventory cycle counts in person, observe how counting actually happens on the floor, and verify that what is counted is what gets recorded.
- Set the cycle count policy: frequency, item selection, tolerance thresholds, recount triggers, and who signs off on what.
- Work count variances back to root cause with the Warehouse Manager and Production Supervisor, and hold the corrective actions to a date.
- Approve period-end valuation of raw materials, work-in-process, and finished goods, and own the reasonableness of the obsolescence and short-dated reserve.
- Assess inventory controls end to end: receiving and put-away accuracy, material issue authorization, lot traceability, who can post adjustments, and approval thresholds for write-offs. Close the gaps that carry real exposure.
- Plan and oversee the full physical inventory, and review the tag reconciliation before any adjustment posts.
- Review and approve the cost accountant’s inventory work rather than duplicating it.
4. Financial Reporting and Analysis
- Produce GAAP-basis monthly financial statements with supporting schedules.
- Build a management reporting package for ownership: margin by customer, margin by product line, labor efficiency, and overhead absorption.
- Stand up budget-to-actual reporting and explain the variances in operational terms, not accounting terms.
- Bring the inventory and work-in-process valuation to a defensible position.
5. Systems and Process Cleanup
- Review the QuickBooks Online chart of accounts and restructure it to support product-line and cost-center reporting.
- Clean up the item master and costing setup so standard costs and BOMs reflect what the floor actually does.
- Recommend whether an inventory or manufacturing application should sit alongside QuickBooks Online, and scope what it would take, so we are deciding with numbers instead of vendor pitches.
- Write practical desk procedures for the recurring accounting workflows, in plain language.
- Identify where manual work should be automated and make the case for it.
Required
- Bachelor’s degree in Accounting or Finance.
- Ten or more years of progressive accounting experience, including at least three in a Controller or Assistant Controller role.
- Hands-on manufacturing accounting experience. Standard costing, work-in-process, bills of material, and overhead absorption need to be things you have built, not things you have read about.
- Demonstrated experience designing or rebuilding a job costing or product costing model from the ground up.
- Experience owning inventory in a physical operation: cycle count programs, physical inventories, subledger-to-general-ledger reconciliation, and reserve judgment. This role includes standing in the warehouse during counts, not reviewing someone else’s file afterward.
- Advanced Excel. Comfortable working with large, messy exports from multiple systems and turning them into something reliable.
- Willingness to work onsite in Chandler, 16 to 24 hours a week, with regular time on the production floor and in the warehouse.
- Ability to operate independently. There is no finance team behind you here, and no ramp-up runway on a three-month engagement.
Preferred
- CPA or CMA.
- Experience in nutraceutical, dietary supplement, food, beverage, or pharmaceutical manufacturing.
- QuickBooks Online experience, particularly building manufacturing cost reporting for a company whose GL does not provide it.
- Experience selecting or implementing an inventory or manufacturing application alongside a small-business accounting system.
- Prior contract or fractional engagements, so you know how to produce results on a fixed clock.
- Experience in a contract manufacturing or co-manufacturing model where customer-level profitability drives pricing.
At the end of three months, we expect to be able to open a report and see what any given production lot cost us to make, understand why, and trust the number. We expect our inventory balance to be one we would defend to a lender or an auditor, supported by counts you personally oversaw. We expect the close to be predictable. And we expect our own team to be running the process, with your documentation, rather than waiting for a consultant to come back.
If that sounds like the kind of engagement you take on, we would like to talk.
TO APPLY
Send a resume or firm capability statement, a short note describing a job costing or product costing build you personally led, and your rate to [email protected]. Please put Fractional Controller in the subject line.
Application Question(s):
- What is your hourly pay expectations for this fractional position?
Experience:
- Manufacturing : 3 years (Preferred)
Work Location: In person
