Finance Lead​/Manager

Location: Traverse City, MI

Salary: $ USD Annually - $ USD Annually

Description: Senior Finance Lead

The Senior Finance Lead safeguards financial integrity while acting as an essential strategic advisor to sales, operations, and procurement teams. The role guarantees the delivery of timely, accurate, and standard-compliant financial records while systematically upgrading systems, data architectures, internal controls, and workflow tech stacks to elevate executive decision-making.

Moving beyond standard accounting functions, this role sits at the intersection of business strategy, data science, financial stewardship, and process engineering. The successful candidate will leverage technology and data intelligence to build automated, highly scalable, and decision-driven workflows.

Protect financial integrity. Establish trusted data structures. Drive commercial performance. Optimize operational efficiency.

• Financial Governance & Reporting Lead and maintain the operational excellence and compliance of core accounting functions.
• Direct full-cycle period-end close processes (monthly, quarterly, and annual).
• Ensure strict compliance with governing accounting standards and GAAP across all financial statements and disclosures.
• Implement robust internal control frameworks, procedures, and documentation that mitigate risk without introducing operational drag.
• Manage balance sheet reconciliation and maintain integrity across key ledgers, including accruals, fixed assets, reserves, and operational balances.
• Spearhead audit preparation, manage review cycles with external auditors, and foster continuous audit readiness.
• Direct foundational transactional workflows (Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable) via automated, exception-directed operational designs.
• Resolve complex accounting treatments for non-standard or intricate business agreements.
• Oversee corporate compliance requirements across tax, treasury, banking, and risk management functions.
• Recruit, mentor, and elevate team performance across accounting and governance functions.

Cultivate data fluency across all core finance functions by mastering underlying data infrastructures rather than relying solely on static outputs.

• Deeply analyze commercial economics, vendor contract structures, customer agreements, and operational flows.
• Evaluate pricing strategies, quote structures, bid proposals, and contract terms prior to execution.
• Conduct profitability assessments across accounts, products, and operational programs.
• Drive operational forecasting models covering revenue pipelines, backlog, fulfillment costs, and working capital needs.
• Assess vendor payment terms, cost structures, and sourcing options to optimize cash flow and liquidity.
• Evaluate financial and balance sheet impacts for custom capital expenditures and non-standard commercial agreements.
• Communicate complex financial metrics and operational insights clearly to non-financial executives.
• Uncover operational efficiencies to proactively expand gross margins, accelerate cash generation, and optimize working capital.

FP&A is an integrated core discipline across the finance organization rather than an isolated department.

• Own and validate financial assumptions across commercial and operational channels.
• Maintain the quantitative inputs and assumptions powering the organization's overarching financial forecast and business model.
• Analyze variance between actual and projected performance through operational drivers.
• Contribute to annual budgeting cycles and long-term strategic plans.
• Build dynamic scenario models evaluating sensitivity around pricing, volume, vendor costs, and working capital parameters.
• Drive cross-functional alignment across finance to publish an integrated corporate outlook.

Accountability extends beyond executing financial operations to continuously refining and scaling those operational workflows.

• Standardize and simplify business processes prior to applying automation tools.
• Identify and eliminate low-value reporting tasks and legacy spreadsheets in favor of scalable system solutions.
• Clean and validate data at the source point rather than performing repetitive downstream corrections.
• Partner with Systems & Tech leads on enterprise software integrations and digital transformation…