Proper is an AI-first accounting service built for property managers and real estate operators. We combine automation, our own technology and a global team of accounting experts to run financial operations that are faster and more accurate than what the industry has settled for.
We are 480 people across the US, Colombia and Mexico, serving 175 property management and real estate clients. We are a San Francisco based company and most of our accounting organisation is in Latin America.
You will run a pod: roughly 20 client accounts, 4 to 6 direct reports, and the 20 or so people who sit under them. Your direct reports are Senior Accountants and Principal Accountants, and each of them leads a small team and owns a set of clients.
You are accountable for three things. Whether those clients stay. Whether the work reaching them is right. Whether the pod makes money.
What makes this job different from most accounting management roles is where you sit. You are not the client's day-to-day contact, and you are not the last person to review every deliverable. Your Senior Accountants do that work and report to you on it. Your job is to know independently whether their picture is accurate, and to coach what you find. That means opening the books yourself, listening to recorded client calls, and forming your own view of an account rather than accepting a status update. If that sounds like less control than you are used to, it is actually more responsibility, and it is the part of the role we care most about.
Key Responsibilities
- Knowing the truth about every account. Run health-check style reviews on client books, looking for discrepancies and for what they say about how the accounting has actually been done. Review our client health dashboard and act on what it surfaces. Spot check financials and client communications. Track error rates. Stay close to escalations and confirm they get resolved.
- Coaching your team. This is the biggest part of the week. You will coach Senior and Principal Accountants on two things at once: running their own teams, and running their clients well. That includes reviewing recorded client calls and giving feedback specific enough to change what happens on the next one.
- Client relationships and value. You check in on accounts on a regular cadence, and you take escalations that need someone more senior. You make sure we are delivering everything the client contracted for, and that our work is not quietly being absorbed back by the client's own team.
- Quality and process. Individual errors get fixed by the team. Your job is to notice when a pattern of errors means something upstream has to change, and then change it. You will drive documentation and standardisation of client processes, and you will be the front line for rolling out new processes and automation with our Operations, Product and Engineering teams, including making sure the feedback from your team actually reaches them.
- The economics. You work with Finance and Workforce Management on capacity, cost to serve and gross margin per client, and you connect those numbers back to how your own pod is staffed and run.
Qualifications & Required Skills
- At least two years managing senior individual contributors or managers, meaning people who had their own reports or owned their own client relationships. Managing a team of processors is not the same job.
- You have personally owned external client relationships. Clients you can name, where you were the person they emailed.
- Working knowledge of US GAAP including financial statement presentation. Enough to read a balance sheet, find something that does not tie, and challenge a senior accountant on it.
- Advanced English. You will be on calls with US property owners.
- Based in Mexico, with enough working-hours overlap to join US business-hours calls.
- One process improvement you ran end to end, where you can tell us the number before and the number after.
- A degree in accounting or demonstrated equivalent knowledge.
Skills Required
- Bachelor's degree in Accounting or a similar degree
- Minimum of 4+ years as an Accounting Manager
- 3+ years of experience managing a team of 20+
- 3+ years of experience managing 10+ clients simultaneously
- Working knowledge of US GAAP (or foreign equivalent)
- Extensive experience working in a large accounting role
- Proven track record of experience in supervising, leading, and coaching a team
- Excellent MS-office or Google Suite experience
- Advanced English
What We Do
As of today, Proper has secured $20M in investments from Silicon Valley’s top VC companies and employs over 300 passionate problem solvers in six countries. We’re developers, designers, engineers, accountants, CPAs, project managers, and creatives. But we’re also surfers, hikers, Sichuan-eaters, photographers, yogis, artists, world travelers, meme lovers, and life-havers. We believe that being able to show up as your full self while doing work that challenges you is the secret to happiness, so we work hard to instill human-centric values into everything we do. Our penchant for streamlining processes combined with our property industry expertise is how we’re able to provide more cost-effective, efficient, scalable financial services that improve our customer’s profit margins. So if you’re looking for the peace of mind that your books are being Properly, frugally, and expertly handled by a team of property accounting specialists? You’ve come to the right place. And if you’re looking to join a team of international problem solvers who are collaborating in a culture that inspires personal growth, fosters creativity, and encourages playfulness? You’ve come to the right place, too. Our Key Values: • Feedback as the Way Forward: Feedback is how we grow, find empathy, and learn how to support each other. • Opportunity as an Outlook: We see obstacles as opportunities to improve. • Communication is the Expectation: We work in unison, set clear expectations, and share frequent updates. • Fun While Getting it Done: Laughter and fun make working together even better. • Respect Over Rank: As humble experts, we educate, support, and never treat anyone as less-than.
