The roleTwo halves, both yours. You own a portfolio of clients outright, and you sit as the review layer over the work our team produces for them: recs, close, payroll, IAS, cash packs come to you, and you set what good looks like before anything reaches a founder. The other half is the messy end. Files arrive on MYOB with a thousand unreconciled lines and an overdue lodgement, and rebuilding them is the fun part, not the annoying part. You review the production work, and you still do the rebuilds yourself when a file is a mess. You migrate, you fix, you design the rhythm, then you run it.

Founders ask you things that need answering today, and you answer them. Whether to wear a fifty thousand dollar surcharge or push it through. Whether a facility is worth its fees. What sell-through implies about the stock sitting in a warehouse. Most weeks you meet clients wherever they are, in Australian hours, with about a day at their Sydney offices when it earns its place.

• What you'll doOwn your clients end to end: the close, the compliance calendar, payroll oversight, cash and payments, delivered to a standard you set.
• Review the team's work for your portfolio and put your name on what goes out.
• Build the monthly pack and the cash view the owner actually uses, not a general ledger dump with a cover page.
• Take the broken files: system migrations, ledger cleanups, wage audits across a few hundred staff, obligations that were missed before you arrived.
• Answer the commercial question the day it lands, in plain language the owner can act on.
• Turn your fixes into method: the rules, the templates and the automations that stop the same problem recurring anywhere.

• Who we're afterCA or CPA who has personally lodged and owned it. Not watched someone else lodge it.
• Three or more years running an Australian finance function where the close, the BAS and the payroll were yours, and you kept running it when a second entity or a broken file turned up.
• Comfortable across a childcare group, a consumer brand, a software business and a trades company in the same week.
• Xero fluent, quick on anything unfamiliar, and using AI properly already: you take the good output and bin the rest.
• Trajectory over tenure. Your best work is still ahead of you, and you are looking to settle in and build something rather than move again in eighteen months.
• Straight-talking, low ego, no politics.