Junior Accountant

About Us

Dandelion Chocolate is a bean-to-bar chocolate factory in San Francisco’s Mission District. We make chocolate from only two ingredients, cocoa beans and cane sugar, and travel to origins as often as we can to build good, trusting relationships with the producers who grow and ferment our beans. Now we’re seeking a Junior Accountant who will help create a complete and buttoned-up finance organization that is producing financial excellence.

About the Role

Your goal isn’t to drive profits and mine every penny. Your goal is to help us build a sustainable business where each team understands how their day-to-day decisions impact long-term financial targets and to develop a sustainable business plan where we produce some of the best chocolate and chocolate experiences in the world. Reporting to the VP of Finance, you’ll work closely with the management team to provide critical data in order to make strategic recommendations and decisions.

This role does not require you to have been a CPA. It does require a strong understanding of accounting, financial reporting, and business operations. You’ll work hand-in-hand with our VP of Finance and our currently outsourced finance team to understand the current accounting processes and help transition them in to our Finance team. You’ll manage accounts payable, accounts receivable, and payroll. You will work closely with the heads of each department to help them understand the metrics that are important to the business and help them make sound, informed decisions in their areas.

In your first few weeks, you’ll familiarize yourself with our current accounts receivable and payable processes, perform a complete audit of both accounts and create a transition plan to bring the respective operations in-house. You will also familiarize yourself with our current payroll process and help transition the operation to the Finance department.

You will oversee the purchase order and employee credit card reconciliation processes and reconcile bank and balance sheet accounts. You will produce timely departmental and consolidated reports to makes sure we are meeting our metrics. For instance, you will work with the Cafe team to track how they are performing against their business targets.

You will know you are doing a good job in this role if we have few financial surprises thanks to your proactive planning, we always have complete, up-to-date reports and metrics ready to go, and we have good visibility into the important, operational segments of our business.

About You

There are many different types of people who could succeed in this role. As long as you have a deep passion for the nitty-gritty of accounting and finance, love spending hours in spreadsheets, can communicate effectively and articulately, and have a good process and analytic sense, you could be a good fit for this role.

You should have the experience to know that no plan ever goes perfectly — machines break, bean containers fall off of ships, and global epidemics halt trade. Rather than work in a secluded office, you’d prefer to be working with teams on the floor and understanding how the business operates first-hand. You know nuts and bolts accounting and how to perform general financial statement analysis. For the right company and the right group of people, you’d love an opportunity to help build a sustainable business that produces some of the world’s very best bean-to-bar craft chocolate that will inspire generations to come. Our ideal candidate is an accountant with through-and-through integrity and a winning, can-do attitude that people want to work with again and again.

Responsibilities

• A/R and A/P: Manage Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable from soup to nuts.
• Month End Close: Assist with the Month End Close process by preparing general ledger entries, accruals, etc. for approval and entry.
• Payroll: Assist with payroll and payroll related items. Help process payroll bi-weekly with a ‘zero-error’ tolerance.
• Purchase Orders: Oversee it. Own it. Make it sing.
• Credit Card Reconciliations: Make it super-easy for all of the cardholders to complete their respective reconciliations. Help them help you.
• Department Schedules: Maintain our accounting and reporting schedules. Make sure that we have zero-surprises and don’t miss a single deadline or filing.
• Filing: It’s gotta get done. The more soft-copy, the better.
• Reconciliations: Bank, balance sheet, and petty cash. You know the drill. Keep us current. Keep us clean.
• Financial Reporting: Prepare departmental and consolidated financial statements, budget vs. actuals, and the resulting variance analysis.
• Accounting Procedures: Develop and maintain our established accounting procedures by analyzing the current processes and recommending changes that make us even better.
• Q&A: Field and answer accounting and financial questions by doing the research and interpreting the data.
• Ad hoc: Perform other accounting, financial, or administrative tasks, as required from time to time.

Requirements

• Experience. You have a Bachelor’s Degree in Accounting or Finance and 2+ years of accounting experience, preferably in retail and or manufacturing. You speak the language of Accounting and can bridge cross-department conversations with ease. You have the ultimate respect for confidentiality and sensitivity.
• Operational chops. You have strong analytical skills, have a healthy knowledge of accounting principles, and are comfortable getting dirty in the details and analyzing financial statements.
• Soft skills. It’s unlikely you’ve ever worked in a culture as collaborative and thoughtful as Dandelion Chocolate. Our culture is a positive, can-do, servant-oriented culture that takes active listening to an entirely new level. You can eloquently distill and communicate complex topics broadly to the management team, individual team members, and everyone in-between.
• Deadline-oriented. You possess excellent organizational and time management skills. You can multitask multiple priorities, and you live and breath due-dates.
• Strong attention to detail. In other words, you must be a perfectionist by nature with no tolerance for financial sloppiness.
• Tech skills. Excellent knowledge of QuickBooks Online, Microsoft Excel, and Google Suite. Ability to adapt and learn new technology applications such as Expensify and Bill.com.

Benefits

Dandelion Chocolate constantly invests in its people and culture. We offer excellent perks including subsidized medical, life, vision, and dental benefits as well as the option to enroll in our 401k program. We offer paid vacation and sick team to our employees as well. Our team members also enjoy commuter benefits, local gym discounts, and lots of chocolate and pastry tasting opportunities.

How to Apply

Dandelion is growing and we are invested in employees who take ownership of their role and are interested in contributing in a bigger way with us. You will stand out from the crowd if your resume is accompanied by a cover letter with a few sentences about your favorite company culture tradition. Please email

jobs@dandelionchocolate.com [jobs@dandelionchocolate.com]. We do our best to respond to all serious candidates within 7-14 days. We look forward to hearing from you!