Financial Controller (Finance Manager)

Location: Remote, with flexibility to convert to hybrid, if required.

Type: Full-time

Reports to: CFO, working closely with the CEO

Team: No direct reports initially

About Clooper

Clooper is a corporate travel management platform. Companies use us to book and control business travel, including flights, hotels, ground transport, visas and travel insurance, with travel policy, approval and reporting built into the process.

We are a UK company with a Nigerian subsidiary. Our clients include enterprises across banking, mining and energy, professional services and diplomatic organisations.

Many come to us because their previous travel arrangements gave them limited visibility over what they were actually spending, where money was going and how effectively travel was being managed.

We are a small, growing team across London and Lagos, combining technology with strong account management and exceptional service.

The role

Travel is a working capital business.

Money moves in volume, across multiple currencies and suppliers. At the same time, our margin is often a relatively small percentage of a large booking value. A missed refund, incorrect supplier charge, unreconciled payment or FX difference can quietly wipe out the profit on several bookings.

Getting that right is one of the most important financial controls in the business.

This role owns it.

Day to day, you will run the core finance function, from bookkeeping and reconciliations through to management accounts, cash flow, credit control, payroll and statutory compliance across our UK and Nigerian entities.

Underneath that, this is also a build role.

Our processes exist and work, but too many still depend on somebody paying attention. We want someone who replaces attention with systems, so that finance can scale with transaction volume rather than with headcount.

Success means that if our transaction volume doubles, we should not need to double the finance workload to stay in control.

What you'll own

• Month-end close across the UK and Nigerian entities
• Preparation of accurate monthly management accounts
• Supplier reconciliations across airlines, hotel suppliers, aggregators, consolidators, transport providers and insurers
• Bank, card and payment-provider reconciliations
• Supplier payment runs and oversight of outstanding supplier balances
• Client billing, accounts receivable and credit control across enterprise payment terms
• Cash flow forecasting and working capital management, including our credit facilities
• A rolling 13-week cash flow forecast
• Gross margin reporting by client, product and transaction type
• FX monitoring and the financial impact of operating across GBP, USD and NGN
• Refunds, credit notes and aged reconciling items, ensuring money owed to Clooper or our clients does not disappear into supplier processes
• Payroll and statutory finance processes
• VAT, PAYE and WHT requirements in Nigeria
• Companies House, HMRC and UK VAT requirements
• Coordination with external accountants, tax advisers and other professional advisers where specialist jurisdictional support is required
• The intercompany accounting arrangement between the UK parent and Nigerian subsidiary
• Preparation of financial information for investors, the board and senior management
• The chart of accounts, QuickBooks setup and financial controls surrounding both
• Audit and investor due diligence readiness
• Improving and automating finance processes as transaction volume grows
  

Your first 90 daysWeeks 1–4: Understand the money flow

Learn our booking-to-cash and supplier-to-payment processes end to end.

Sit with operations and understand how a booking becomes an invoice, how suppliers charge us, how customers pay us, how refunds move and every point where the process can break.

By the end of your first month, we expect you to:

• Map the key finance processes
• Identify control gaps and recurring reconciliation issues
• Highlight potential areas of margin leakage
• Identify processes that depend excessively on individual memory or manual intervention
• Establish or strengthen our rolling cash flow forecast

Weeks 5–8: Own the numbers

Take full ownership of month-end close.

Establish a defensible view of our gross margin by client and product. Where the underlying data is unreliable, tell us why, quantify the problem where possible and establish the process needed to make it reliable.

We want numbers that can withstand challenge, not numbers that simply look right.

Weeks 9–12: Improve the system

Establish a repeatable month-end timetable and management dashboard covering:

• Cash
• Receivables
• Payables
• Gross margin
• Working capital
• Key finance exceptions

Then take the most manual finance process you have identified and automate or materially improve it.

Show us the before and the after.

Tooling and AI

We run QuickBooks across both entities, use spreadsheets extensively and use AI as part of our day-to-day work.

We are not looking for someone who has merely "used ChatGPT".

We are looking for someone whose instinct, when faced with a repetitive task, is to ask whether it needs to remain repetitive at all.

In practice, that could mean:

• Extracting structured data from supplier PDFs, airline statements, invoices and hotel folios without manually retyping everything
• Building reconciliations and reports that refresh rather than being rebuilt every month
• Improving spreadsheet workflows using formulas, Power Query or similar tools
• Writing whatever the problem requires, whether that is a prompt, formula, script or automation
• Finding sensible ways to connect finance data that currently lives in different places

We do not expect you to be a software engineer.

We do expect curiosity, judgement and a low tolerance for unnecessary manual work.

And we expect scepticism.

A model can hand you a confident number that is completely wrong.

You check.

What we're looking for

• Qualified or part-qualified ICAN, ACCA, ACA, CIMA or equivalent professional experience
• Around 5+ years of relevant finance experience
• Experience somewhere you had substantial ownership of the finance function rather than being one small part of a large department
• Strong QuickBooks experience, or strong experience with a comparable accounting platform and the ability to learn quickly
• Genuinely strong Excel or Google Sheets capability, including pivots, lookups and ideally Power Query or an equivalent
• Experience with multi-currency accounting
• Experience working across multiple entities
• Comfortable managing high transaction volumes, large gross booking values and relatively thin margins
• Strong reconciliation skills
• Strong understanding of cash flow and working capital
• Able to communicate financial information clearly to people who do not work in finance
• Comfortable challenging numbers, processes and assumptions when something does not make sense

You should also be the sort of person who is uncomfortable leaving an unexplained balance unexplained.

If £2,413.72 does not reconcile, you want to know why.

Useful, but not required

• Travel industry experience
• Logistics, marketplace, payments, fintech or e-commerce experience
• Exposure to both Nigerian and UK tax and statutory requirements
• Experience supporting an audit
• Experience preparing a company for investor due diligence
• Experience managing credit facilities
• SQL, Python or automation tools
• Experience building financial dashboards or automated reporting
  

What this role is not

• It is not a job with a large team beneath you. You will do the work as well as improve the way the work gets done.
• It is not a job at a company with completely settled processes. Some of what you inherit will need improving. Finding that out is part of the role.
• It is not a finance role that sits at a distance from the business. Finance and operations are tightly connected here. You will spend a lot of time understanding how bookings actually work, challenging processes and fixing problems alongside the operations team.
• It is not a role for someone comfortable with unexplained numbers. Reconciliations need to reconcile.
• It is not slow. But we do not confuse being busy with being urgent.
  

The person who will do well here

You are commercially minded, hands-on and comfortable taking ownership.

You understand that producing the accounts is only part of the job. The more important question is whether the numbers tell us what is actually happening in the business.

You care about cash.

You care about margin.

You care about controls.

And when you find a process that relies on someone remembering to do the right thing every Tuesday, you build a better process.

Ultimately, we want someone who can tell us, with confidence:

Where every pound, naira and dollar came from, where it went, what Clooper made on the transaction, what is still owed and why.

• Then build the systems that allow us to know the same thing at twice the volume.