Founding Controller - Interior Design Bookkeeper

Founding Controller — Accounting Practice for Interior Design Studios

We’re building something specific: a bookkeeping and accounting practice built exclusively for interior design studios, launching from an established base of 150+ studio relationships. This isn’t a generalist firm that happens to take designers. It’s the opposite — deep specialization in the way designers actually run money: client and vendor deposits, markup and margin, time billing, project profitability, and the Studio Designer–to–QuickBooks reconciliation that turns most studios’ books into a mess.

We’re looking for our first hire and the person who will own delivery from day one.

What you’ll do

You’ll start by running the books for our first studio clients yourself — and then turn how you do it into a repeatable system. Your real mandate is to build the engine: the close checklists, the onboarding flow, the reconciliation playbook, and the standards that let us bring on the next ten clients without reinventing the work each time. As we grow, you step into the reviewer/controller seat, junior staff run the transactional work to your process, and you own quality. You’re a builder first and a doer second.

You’re probably right for this if you’ve

• Done the books for interior design studios — or inside one — and know exactly why deposits and markup break standard bookkeeping
• Worked hands-on in Studio Designer (or learned a project-accounting system fast enough to prove you could) and know QuickBooks Online cold
• Built close checklists, SOPs, or workflows that someone else could follow — you think in repeatable process, not heroics
• Worked directly with business owners and carried yourself like the professional they’d trust with their finances

QuickBooks ProAdvisor status is a strong plus. So is anything that shows you can take a messy file and make it tie out — and then make the fix repeatable.

Why this is worth your time

Most controller roles are maintenance. This one is construction. You’ll define how an entire practice operates, in a niche where genuine expertise is scarce and clients are already waiting. The relationships are warm, the focus is narrow, and the person who builds the machine has an outsized hand in what it becomes.

Compensation Competitive, commensurate with experience, with meaningful upside for the right person.