Bookkeeper

<p>Bookkeeper — Lab54</p> <p><strong>Location:</strong> London. All 3 days in office for the first three months. From month 4, 1 day per week remote once the agreed targets are being met.</p> <p><strong>Shape:</strong> Part-time, 3 days per week. Permanent or contract — both considered.</p> <p><strong>Salary:</strong> £30–34k FTE equivalent, pro-rata (£18–20.5k at 3 days). Contract equivalent £150–200 per day.</p> <p><strong>Reports to:</strong> Financial Controller (interim: Managing Director)</p> <p><strong>Start:</strong> As soon as available</p> <h2>About Lab54</h2> <p>Lab54 is a content-led events and production company: <strong>[Anywhere But A Club.]</strong></p> <p>We create high-impact experiences in unexpected locations, capture them, and turn them into content. Combined global audience of 425,000+. We work with brands, record labels and artists — around 100 events a year across brand activations, artist pop-ups, hard-ticket shows, house parties and festival takeovers.</p> <h2>The role</h2> <p>The Bookkeeper is Lab54's day-to-day finance function: reconciliation, purchase-order matching, receipt capture, invoicing, debtor chasing and payroll preparation.</p> <p>The defining feature of the job is that <strong>every pound has to land against an event.</strong> Lab54's core financial object isn't the month — it's the project. Each event carries a code (YYMM-Owner-Event-City) that runs from HubSpot through Xero, Teamwork and the purchase-order flow. Coding transactions to that project is not admin; it's the thing that makes per-event profitability computable. It is the single most important part of this role.</p> <p>This role <strong>prepares, never approves.</strong> All payment runs are approved by the Managing Director, with the CEO approving above an agreed threshold.</p> <h2>Responsibilities</h2> <p><strong>Purchase orders and supplier ledger</strong></p> <ul> <li>Match supplier invoices to their purchase order in Xero. This is a manual link, and it is the control that stops us paying more than we agreed.</li> <li>Enforce the PO rule at the front door: any commitment of £500 or more needs a PO, and an invoice arriving without a PO number goes back to the supplier rather than into the ledger.</li> <li>Prepare payment runs for approval. Nothing leaves the business without a bill, a PO and a sign-off.</li> <li>Reconcile supplier statements monthly against our purchase ledger — the check that catches duplicate invoices and payments before they're made.</li> <li>Maintain the purchase ledger and keep the aged creditor position accurate.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Reconciliation and coding</strong></p> <ul> <li>Bank and card reconciliations kept current within 48 hours, including Revolut Business card spend against Xero tracking categories.</li> <li>Every reconciled line matched to a real source document. A line that reconciles without a bill behind it is an exception to raise, not a box to tick.</li> <li>Code every transaction to the correct project code and tracking category. Chase the team when a code is missing rather than guessing one.</li> <li>Keep the suspense and uncoded accounts at nil by month-end.</li> <li>Produce a weekly untagged-spend report, by spender, and drive it to zero.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Receipts and VAT recovery</strong></p> <ul> <li>Chase and capture missing receipts to a 98% target. This is a cash exercise, not a filing one — every missing VAT invoice is input VAT we can't reclaim.</li> <li>Flag transactions carrying no VAT treatment where the supplier is UK VAT-registered.</li> <li>Prepare the VAT return workings for the external accountancy firm, who own submission.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Sales invoicing and debtors</strong></p> <ul> <li>Raise client invoices within 48 hours of the billing trigger, coded to the project.</li> <li>Own debtor chasing end to end — a consistent cycle, escalated when it stalls, so nobody else in the business is carrying it.</li> <li>Match incoming receipts to the right invoice and contact. Money that arrives against the wrong customer looks identical to money that never arrived.</li> <li>Keep sales invoice sequencing clean — anything voided or reissued carries a recorded reason.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Project close</strong></p> <ul> <li>When a project closes, produce its final position: budgeted cost against actual cost, budgeted revenue against invoiced revenue, and the resulting margin.</li> <li>Issue that to the CEO and Operations Director as a matter of routine. It is not a report anyone should have to request.</li> <li>Late costs land after an event has finished — that's the nature of the business. The job is to make sure they land against the right project and that the closing number reflects them.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Cash and reporting</strong></p> <ul> <li>Produce a weekly cash one-pager: bank position, overdue debtors with days outstanding, payment runs due, projected balance.</li> <li>Keep the company's master P&#x26;L model current — updating actuals and committed costs as they change, so the forecast reflects where the business genuinely is.</li> <li>The model is ours; you update the numbers within it. Structural or formula changes come to the CEO first.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Payroll preparation</strong></p> <ul> <li>Prepare payroll data and submit it to the external payroll provider ahead of deadline.</li> <li>Post the payroll journal to Xero each month. Wages must not sit in a control account.</li> <li>Confirm the payroll account is funded before each run. This role does not execute payroll.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Close, deadlines and records</strong></p> <ul> <li>Run the monthly close to a published working-day deadline: accruals prepared with supporting detail, journals posted, period locked.</li> <li>Every accrual carries a schedule — supplier, event, date of work. No balance we can't explain.</li> <li>Maintain the statutory deadline register (VAT, PAYE, corporation tax, Companies House) and flag each one in advance. No filing sits invisibly in someone else's workflow.</li> <li>Keep records orderly and audit-ready for the external accountancy firm.</li> </ul> <h2>What the first 90 days actually look like</h2> <p>We are being straight about this because we want someone who finds it interesting rather than alarming.</p> <p>Lab54 has grown faster than its finance function, and we've recently changed accountants. The ledger carries a real backlog: untagged transactions across two financial years, unposted payroll journals, a month-end close that has not been run to a cadence, and a purchase-order process that has only just gone live. There is a documented correction schedule and an external FD working through it.</p> <p>The first 90 days is a clean-up, not a steady state.</p> <p><strong>Days 1–30.</strong> Learn the ledger and the project-code structure. Take over reconciliation, receipt capture and PO matching. Get the weekly untagged report running.</p> <p><strong>Days 31–60.</strong> Clear the untagged backlog. Take over sales invoicing, debtor chasing and received-payment matching. Payroll preparation and the monthly payroll journal move across.</p> <p><strong>Days 61–90.</strong> Run a full month close to deadline: suspense at nil, every accrual scheduled, supplier statements reconciled. Per-project cost data becomes reportable for the first time.</p> <p>After that it becomes a genuinely well-defined job inside a documented control structure — and you'll have built it.</p> <p><strong>On being in the office.</strong> The first three months are fully office-based, and that's deliberate rather than a policy position. Clearing a backlog this size means asking people questions in real time — whose card that was, what the missing PO covers, which event a supplier belongs to. That's an hour of work in a room and a week of work over email. From month 4, one of the three days moves to remote, provided the measures below are being met.</p> <h2>What we're looking for</h2> <p><strong>Essential</strong></p> <ul> <li>Proven bookkeeping experience. <strong>Xero to a high standard is non-negotiable</strong> — tracking categories, purchase orders, bank rules, manual journals.</li> <li>Purchase-order matching and supplier statement reconciliation as routine practice.</li> <li>A project- or job-costing background — agency, events, production, construction, consultancy, anywhere the job rather than the month is the unit of profit. This is the part of the role we can't train quickly.</li> <li>Strong reconciliation, coding and purchase-ledger discipline.</li> <li>Experience preparing payroll data for an external provider and posting the payroll journal.</li> <li>Comfortable working inside a defined control structure where you prepare and someone else approves.</li> <li>Reliability over ambition. The value of this role is that nothing is ever late or missing.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Nice to have</strong></p> <ul> <li>Multi-currency invoicing and foreign supplier payments. We run events across Europe.</li> <li>Dext, Revolut Business, or similar capture and expense tooling.</li> <li>Experience cleaning up a ledger rather than only maintaining a tidy one.</li> </ul> <p><strong>How you'll work</strong></p> <ul> <li>Meticulous. Proactive on receipts, POs and debtors — chasing people is part of the job, not an escalation.</li> <li>Willing to say when something doesn't look right. A number you can't explain is a question, not a rounding difference.</li> <li>Discreet and trustworthy with company finances.</li> </ul> <p>Organised to ...</p> <p>Find <a href="https://www.arbeitnow.co.uk">Jobs in United Kingdom</a> on Arbeitnow</a>