Senior Accountant - Cleanup Manager

Breakwater Accounting + Advisory; Wilmington (DE); On-site; USD 65,000 - 85,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Salary range: $65k–$85k

Five weeks PTO

Job summary

Breakwater Accounting + Advisory is seeking a Cleanup Manager who thrives on turning messy financials into trusted, clean books. You will investigate, trace, and rebuild accounts, producing defensible financials for leadership and ongoing teams.

You'll handle multiple cleanup projects, redesign chart of accounts, and ensure accurate financial storytelling for clients. Strong communication with non-accountants is essential.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Accounting.
• 5+ years of high-level accounting, audit, or full-cycle bookkeeping experience.
• Strong understanding of how balance sheets work.
• Experience with accruals, revenue recognition, depreciation, amortization, and other complex concepts.
• Prior reviewer, senior accountant, audit, or similar experience.
• Proven experience cleaning up messy or inaccurate financials.
• Excellent investigative and problem-solving instincts.
• Ability to stay focused and see a problem through to completion.
• Confidence communicating complex financial issues to non-accountants.
• Ability to manage multiple projects without losing the details.

Responsibilities

• Dig into messy financial records to understand what happened and why.
• Trace transactions to uncover errors, missing information, and broken processes.
• Develop practical cleanup plans and work through them to completion.
• Reconstruct financial activity when the existing records don't tell the full story.
• Reconcile and substantiate major balance sheet accounts including cash, payroll, loans, revenue, prepaids, accruals, fixed assets, and equity.
• Create supporting schedules and documentation that show why the numbers are right.
• Go beyond “it balances” to create financials that are accurate, explainable, and defensible.
• Redesign charts of accounts when they no longer serve the business.
• Organize financial reporting so owners can understand what is actually happening.
• Identify the story behind the numbers and make that story easier to see.
• Reverse-engineer workflows to understand where things went wrong.
• Help create better processes so the same problem doesn't show up again.
• Communicate and collaborate with clients and Breakwater team to keep projects moving.

Skills

Accounting

Analytical thinking

Investigation

Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in Accounting

Tools

Xero

Dext

Ramp

BILL

Gusto

ACS/Realm

Excel

Job description

Some accountants like maintaining clean books.

You like figuring out why they aren't clean in the first place.

Breakwater Accounting & Advisory is looking for a Cleanup Manager who gets genuine satisfaction from taking messy financials, figuring out what happened, and turning them into books that leadership can actually trust.

You investigate. You trace the money. You ask questions. You test theories. You rebuild accounts. You find the root cause. Then you create a clean, reliable financial picture that the client and our ongoing accounting team can trust.

And then?

You move on to the next puzzle.

This is a role for someone who enjoys variety and problem solving. You'll work on multiple cleanup projects at once, diving into each one, solving the problem, creating a clean handoff, and moving forward.

What You'll Do

Find the mess. Figure out what happened. Fix it. Prove it's right. Move on to the next puzzle.

Investigate and solve

• Dig into messy financial records to understand what happened and why.
• Trace transactions to uncover errors, missing information, and broken processes.
• Develop practical cleanup plans and work through them to completion.
• Reconstruct financial activity when the existing records don't tell the full story.

Prove the numbers are right

• Reconcile and substantiate major balance sheet accounts including cash, payroll, loans, revenue, prepaids, accruals, fixed assets, and equity.
• Create supporting schedules and documentation that show why the numbers are right.
• Go beyond “it balances” to create financials that are accurate, explainable, and defensible.

Make the books make sense

• Redesign charts of accounts when they no longer serve the business.
• Organize financial reporting so business owners can understand what is actually happening.
• Identify the story behind the numbers and make that story easier to see.

Fix what caused the problem

• You'll reverse-engineer workflows such as invoicing, payroll, inventory, and expenses to understand where things went wrong.
• Help create better processes so the same problem doesn't show up again.

We don't believe in cleaning up the same mess twice.

Use your accounting and technology expertise

• QuickBooks Online is one of your primary tools. You'll troubleshoot complex issues, untangle stubborn balances, and find solutions when the obvious answer isn't working.
• We're a tech-forward team. We use modern accounting technology and AI to solve problems and improve efficiency. You don't need to be an AI expert. You do need to be curious and willing to try new approaches.

Communicate and collaborate

• Work directly with clients to ask smart questions, gather missing information, explain complicated accounting issues, and keep projects moving.
• Collaborate with the Breakwater team, document your work, and create clean handoffs to the ongoing accounting team.

What We're Looking For

• Bachelor's degree in Accounting.
• 5+ years of high-level accounting, audit, or full-cycle bookkeeping experience.
• Strong understanding of how balance sheets actually work.
• Experience with accruals, revenue recognition, depreciation, amortization, and other complex accounting concepts.
• Prior reviewer, senior accountant, audit, or similar experience.
• Proven experience cleaning up messy or inaccurate financials.
• Excellent investigative and problem-solving instincts.
• Ability to stay focused and see a problem through to completion.
• Confidence communicating complex financial issues to non-accountants.
• Ability to manage multiple projects without losing the details.

Experience in an outsourced, multi-client accounting environment is a plus, as is experience with tools such as Xero, Dext, Ramp, BILL, Gusto, ACS/Realm, and advanced Excel.

Why Breakwater?

At Breakwater, you'll work with businesses and nonprofits across a variety of industries, so no two cleanup projects are exactly alike.

You'll join a team that values being proactive, positive, prepared, purposeful, protective, and principled.

You'll also get:

• $65,000 to $85,000 salary
• Five weeks of PTO
• A collaborative, supportive team
• Challenging accounting work where you get to solve problems every day

Breakwater Accounting + Advisory provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.

This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training.