Management Accountant; AI & Automation

Position: Management Accountant (AI & Automation)
Location: Brighton and Hove

Who are we?

Grip is the AI-powered, end-to-end event platform built for engagement. The flexible system helps commercial event organizers like Ascential, Hyve, Emerald and Clarion Events boost revenue by establishing, maintaining and tracking relationships between participants over multiple events. This is possible because Grip goes beyond networking. It combines AI with billions of interactions happening across the platform with a powerful event management system, seamless registration and award-winning mobile event app so participants meet the right people at the right time.

We're hiring a finance generalist who runs the numbers, owns the close, and automates the routine so the team spends its time on analysis and decisions.

Grip is the AI-powered, end-to-end event platform built for engagement. Commercial event organisers like Ascential, Hyve, Emerald and Clarion Events use Grip to build, maintain and track relationships between participants across multiple events. We operate as a three-entity group across the UK, US and Serbia.

You'll report to the Head of Finance and sit in a small team. The expectation is explicit: every manual process you inherit is a candidate for automation, and success is measured by how much of your week moves from processing to analysis.

Essential

• 2–4 years in a finance role covering month-end close and management accounts.
• Part-qualified or qualified ACCA, CIMA or ACA, or working towards it.
• Hands-on Xero experience; comfort with multi-currency and multi-entity accounting.
• Advanced Excel / Google Sheets: lookups, pivots, array formulas, building schedules from scratch.
• Evidence of using AI tools or automation to remove manual work, with a measurable result.
• Understanding of subscription revenue, deferred revenue and SaaS metrics.

Nice to have

• Maxio, Salesforce, Stripe, Avalara, Moss or Revolut Business.
• Building with LLMs (Claude, ChatGPT), workflow tools (Zapier, Make), Apps Script, SQL or Python.
• Intercompany, transfer pricing or US sales tax exposure.
• Events industry experience.

Profile

• Treats a repeated task as a design problem, not a routine.
• Checks the output of automation as rigorously as their own work.
• Explains numbers clearly to non-finance budget holders.
• Comfortable working remotely across UK, US and Serbian time zones.

Expectation of the role:

Responsibilities Management accounting & month-end close

• Own the monthly close across UK (GBP), US (USD) and Serbia (RSD) entities to a WD3 timetable.
• Prepare balance sheet reconciliations, prepayments, accruals, fixed assets, depreciation and payroll journals.
• Run intercompany reconciliation and FX revaluation, and post the group's consolidation adjustments.
• Produce monthly management accounts with variance analysis against budget and prior period.
• Maintain department and vendor-level cost reporting and flag spend trends to budget holders.
• Maintain the 13-week cash forecast and bank balance reporting; support payroll funding.
• Support year-end, audit files and liaison with external advisors in each jurisdiction.

2. Revenue, billing & AR

• Validate closed-won deals from Salesforce and ensure accurate invoicing through Maxio and Xero.
• Own deferred revenue calculations and revenue recognition compliance for subscription contracts.
• Reconcile the Stripe clearing account and Lead Retrieval PAYG revenue.
• Manage multi-currency AR and collections, and resolve billing queries with Go-To-Market teams.
• Support US sales tax compliance:
  Avalara reconciliation and reporting to our tax advisors.

3. AI, automation & systems

• Build, test and maintain AI agents for finance workflows on a flag-and-approve basis: a human reviews before anything posts.
• Map every recurring task on the close calendar and score it for automation potential.
• Improve integrations…