Fractional Controller — Specialty Finance, Lender Reporting (QBO)

We need a controller who can open a workbook someone else built, find the defect quietly doubling a number, and fix it. One of ours currently reports $6.02M where the right answer is $3.62M — a stray totals row inside a summed range. The stop-loss finance domain we can teach. That instinct we can't. We're a US healthcare-finance company financing employer stop-loss claims — around 350 customers, roughly $3.6M in annual fee revenue on a much larger financed receivables book. QuickBooks Online, an internal operational app, and a Python/DuckDB analytics pipeline. We're funded by a senior credit facility and mezzanine debt through two related entities that report separately to two different creditors, so this is not a one-book multi-entity setup. THE DAILY RHYTHM Pull bank balances across a collections account, a funding account, a lender-side destination account and blocked accounts under account-control agreements; verify the collection-to-funding-to-destination waterfall; check two liquidity covenants that use different formulas; and re-verify borrowing base availability before any individual draw, recycling request or distribution — that check is per-transaction, not monthly. THE MONTHLY RHYTHM Run a close whose daily cash rollforward ties to the bank to the penny. Produce the Borrowing Base Certificate by the 15th. Deliver the Compliance Certificate with the periodic financials. Reconcile the outsourced Servicer's monthly report against your own numbers — you don't build that report, you're the check on it. WHAT YOU'D OWN - The close and journal entries, including reconciling two currently conflicting journal-entry models into one. - Multi-entity consolidation across entities with genuinely separate lender reporting obligations. - The borrowing base and claim aging workbook — including defending which receivables are excluded from the collateral pool, where one wrong inclusion already misstated a reported figure by six figures. - Invoicing cleanup across three billing modes, with a real backlog: unbilled clients, duplicate invoices, invoices past a year, and a commission rate that silently dropped and cost about $94K. - Cash application, including splitting lump-sum partner remittances with no system-level payment-to-invoice link today. - Defining terms that have no agreed definition here yet ("unapplied collection", "overpayment balance"). YOU WOULD CARRY REAL CERTIFYING CAPACITY Our credit agreements name "controller" as a qualifying Authorized Officer title, so you would sign the Borrowing Base Certificate. Our interim CFO or CEO executes the Compliance Certificate. WHAT YOU WOULD NOT OWN The mechanical pipeline — ingestion, dedup and routine categorisation are automated, and your job is to set the rules and clear the roughly 60 genuinely ambiguous rows a period, not hand-tag every transaction. You don't build pricing or margin models (you consume them), don't interpret covenants (counsel), and don't debug sync bugs behind a reconciliation break (engineering) — there your job is to demand the number tie out and refuse to certify until it does. WHAT THIS IS NOT A clean shop. You're inheriting fragile workbooks, a manual invoicing backlog, and at least one live unexplained six-figure reconciliation variance. If that's a dealbreaker, this isn't the right engagement. ENGAGEMENT Part-time to start with a genuine path to full-time — 25-30 hrs/week for the first 60 days to clear the backlog and establish the close cadence, settling to 15-25 hrs/week. Remote, US-based. Reports to the founder, and to our fractional CFO as that seat fills. DEFINITION OF DONE — FIRST 90 DAYS Days 1-30: every open item inventoried with dollar exposure quantified; a written definition of "reconciled" for borrowing-base purposes; documented collateral-pool exclusion criteria; a first pass identifying the fragile formulas in the inherited workbooks. Days 30-60: the unbilled clients billed; duplicates resolved; the commission discrepancy quantified with a remediation path; the open variance formally escalated with an owner and a date; working definitions for the two undefined terms; a failed-ACH-pull procedure written. Days 60-90: the two journal-entry models reconciled with a recommended standard; a close producing a borrowing base you will certify without caveats; a proposed path to version the borrowing base definition. REQUIRED Excel forensic repair — finding and fixing broken formulas, volatile date functions and hardcoded totals cells in inherited workbooks. Specialty-finance, ABL or factoring-receivables accounting. Controlled-account waterfall, borrowing-base and offset/contra fluency. Hands-on QuickBooks Online. Bank reconciliation and treasury cash management. Multi-entity consolidation with separate lender reporting. Audit and tax coordination. US GAAP. NICE TO HAVE Prior lender or ABL reporting experience; SQL or Python; healthcare, insurance or stop-loss background; CPA or CMA.