About Proper
Proper is an AI-first accounting service built for property managers and real estate operators. We combine automation, our own technology and a global team of accounting experts to run financial operations that are faster and more accurate than what the industry has settled for.
We are 480 people across the US, Colombia and Mexico, serving 175 property management and real estate clients. We are a San Francisco based company and most of our accounting organisation is in Latin America.
The role
You will run a pod: roughly 20 client accounts, 4 to 6 direct reports, and the 20 or so people who sit under them. Your direct reports are Senior Accountants and Principal Accountants, and each of them leads a small team and owns a set of clients.
You are accountable for three things. Whether those clients stay. Whether the work reaching them is right. Whether the pod makes money.
What makes this job different from most accounting management roles is where you sit. You are not the client's day-to-day contact, and you are not the last person to review every deliverable. Your Senior Accountants do that work and report to you on it. Your job is to know independently whether their picture is accurate, and to coach what you find. That means opening the books yourself, listening to recorded client calls, and forming your own view of an account rather than accepting a status update. If that sounds like less control than you are used to, it is actually more responsibility, and it is the part of the role we care most about.
Key Responsibilities
Knowing the truth about every account. Run health-check style reviews on client books, looking for discrepancies and for what they say about how the accounting has actually been done. Review our client health dashboard and act on what it surfaces. Spot check financials and client communications. Track error rates. Stay close to escalations and confirm they get resolved.
Coaching your team. This is the biggest part of the week. You will coach Senior and Principal Accountants on two things at once: running their own teams, and running their clients well. That includes reviewing recorded client calls and giving feedback specific enough to change what happens on the next one.
Client relationships and value. You check in on accounts on a regular cadence, and you take escalations that need someone more senior. You make sure we are delivering everything the client contracted for, and that our work is not quietly being absorbed back by the client's own team.
Quality and process. Individual errors get fixed by the team. Your job is to notice when a pattern of errors means something upstream has to change, and then change it. You will drive documentation and standardisation of client processes, and you will be the front line for rolling out new processes and automation with our Operations, Product and Engineering teams, including making sure the feedback from your team actually reaches them.
The economics. You work with Finance and Workforce Management on capacity, cost to serve and gross margin per client, and you connect those numbers back to how your own pod is staffed and run.
Qualifications & Required Skills
At least two years managing senior individual contributors or managers, meaning people who had their own reports or owned their own client relationships. Managing a team of processors is not the same job.
You have personally owned external client relationships. Clients you can name, where you were the person they emailed.
Working knowledge of US GAAP including financial statement presentation. Enough to read a balance sheet, find something that does not tie, and challenge a senior accountant on it.
Advanced English. You will be on calls with US property owners.
Based in Colombia, with enough working-hours overlap to join US business-hours calls.
One process improvement you ran end to end, where you can tell us the number before and the number after.
A degree in accounting or demonstrated equivalent knowledge.
