Household Accountant​/Finance Manager, Single Family Office

The roleA private family with two homes and a country estate is looking for a finance professional to take over the whole of its household money administration: the books, the running costs, the purchasing and the calls.

Money leaves this household three ways — through bills, through cards and through purchases. This role stands over all three. It is not a back-office bookkeeping post: the ledger is the foundation, but the larger part of the job is owning the household's running costs, buying what the homes and their staff need, and handling every financial call and piece of correspondence, so that none of it reaches the family or their Personal Assistant.

The household

Two homes: a country estate in Buckinghamshire with grounds staff, outbuildings, irrigation and machinery, and a London home.

Staff: around ten household and estate employees, currently paid through an external payroll bureau. Payroll is moving in-house, and this role will run it.

Systems:
Xero for the ledger, Dext for invoice capture by email, and Soldo expense cards for staff. These are established; the postholder works within them.

Responsibilities Keeping the books
1. Ledger and bills

Process invoices from Dext into Xero, coded to property, estate, personal or staff, and published.

Catch what capture misses — in particular the same invoice arriving twice in different formats.

Prepare a weekly payment run for the family to authorise, with a clear schedule of what is due and when.

Reconcile bank and card feeds monthly, so that nothing sits unidentified beyond the month it occurred in.

Keep the supplier ledger: contacts, payment terms, and what each supplier is contracted to provide
2. Personal and travel spending

Keep personal, household, estate and any business-related spending cleanly separated — defensibly, not approximately.

Identify large one-off payments — a travel agent, a villa deposit, a trip — when they happen, not months later. Invoiced trips go through the normal Xero route for authorisation.

Pursue refunds, cancellations, credits and travel-insurance claims through to settlement.

Flag any spending with a possible tax consequence to the family's accountants — staff travelling with the family, a trip with a business element, significant foreign-currency spending.

Booking travel remains with the Personal Assistant.
3. ReportingA monthly pack: cost per property, spend against budget, staff card spend as its own line, exceptions, and anything needing a decision.

An annual budget for each home and for the estate, built with the family and tracked through the year.

Clean year-end books for the family's accountants, with their queries answered directly.

Controlling what goes out
4. Utilities and recurring costs — the part of the role the family most wants filled

One register of every recurring supply and service across both homes and the estate: energy and heating oil, water, broadband and phones, waste, alarm and CCTV monitoring, boiler, generator and plant servicing, TV licences, council tax and insurance. For each: supplier, account number, tariff or premium, renewal date and how it is paid.

Read the bills, not just pay them. Track consumption month on month and investigate anomalies. On an estate an unexplained spike is usually a fault — a leak, a failed timer, a heater left running — and finding it early is where this role pays for itself.

Own the renewal calendar. Nothing rolls on to a default tariff by inattention; options go to the family before each deadline, not after.

Submit meter readings, challenge estimated bills, and reconcile final bills on every change of tariff or supplier.
5. Purchasing Large purchases and major works: obtain and compare quotations, check specification and warranty, negotiate price and terms, and…