Bookkeeper — Lab54

Location: London. All 3 days in office for the first three months. From month 4, 1 day per week remote once the agreed targets are being met.

Shape: Part-time, 3 days per week. Permanent or contract — both considered.

Salary: £30–34k FTE equivalent, pro-rata (£18–20.5k at 3 days). Contract equivalent £150–200 per day.

Reports to: Financial Controller (interim: Managing Director)

Start: As soon as available

About Lab54

Lab54 is a content-led events and production company: [Anywhere But A Club.]

We create high-impact experiences in unexpected locations, capture them, and turn them into content. Combined global audience of 425,000+. We work with brands, record labels and artists — around 100 events a year across brand activations, artist pop-ups, hard-ticket shows, house parties and festival takeovers.

The role

The Bookkeeper is Lab54's day-to-day finance function: reconciliation, purchase-order matching, receipt capture, invoicing, debtor chasing and payroll preparation.

The defining feature of the job is that every pound has to land against an event. Lab54's core financial object isn't the month — it's the project. Each event carries a code (YYMM-Owner-Event-City) that runs from HubSpot through Xero, Teamwork and the purchase-order flow. Coding transactions to that project is not admin; it's the thing that makes per-event profitability computable. It is the single most important part of this role.

This role prepares, never approves. All payment runs are approved by the Managing Director, with the CEO approving above an agreed threshold.

Responsibilities

Purchase orders and supplier ledger

• Match supplier invoices to their purchase order in Xero. This is a manual link, and it is the control that stops us paying more than we agreed.

• Enforce the PO rule at the front door: any commitment of £500 or more needs a PO, and an invoice arriving without a PO number goes back to the supplier rather than into the ledger.

• Prepare payment runs for approval. Nothing leaves the business without a bill, a PO and a sign-off.

• Reconcile supplier statements monthly against our purchase ledger — the check that catches duplicate invoices and payments before they're made.

• Maintain the purchase ledger and keep the aged creditor position accurate.

Reconciliation and coding

• Bank and card reconciliations kept current within 48 hours, including Revolut Business card spend against Xero tracking categories.

• Every reconciled line matched to a real source document. A line that reconciles without a bill behind it is an exception to raise, not a box to tick.

• Code every transaction to the correct project code and tracking category. Chase the team when a code is missing rather than guessing one.

• Keep the suspense and uncoded accounts at nil by month-end.

• Produce a weekly untagged-spend report, by spender, and drive it to zero.

Receipts and VAT recovery

• Chase and capture missing receipts to a 98% target. This is a cash exercise, not a filing one — every missing VAT invoice is input VAT we can't reclaim.

• Flag transactions carrying no VAT treatment where the supplier is UK VAT-registered.

• Prepare the VAT return workings for the external accountancy firm, who own submission.

Sales invoicing and debtors

• Raise client invoices within 48 hours of the billing trigger, coded to the project.

• Own debtor chasing end to end — a consistent cycle, escalated when it stalls, so nobody else in the business is carrying it.

• Match incoming receipts to the right invoice and contact. Money that arrives against the wrong customer looks identical to money that never arrived.

• Keep sales invoice sequencing clean — anything voided or reissued carries a recorded reason.

Project close

• When a project closes, produce its final position: budgeted cost against actual cost, budgeted revenue against invoiced revenue, and the resulting margin.

• Issue that to the CEO and Operations Director as a matter of routine. It is not a report anyone should have to request.

• Late costs land after an event has finished — that's the nature of the business. The job is to make sure they land against the right project and that the closing number reflects them.

Cash and reporting

• Produce a weekly cash one-pager: bank position, overdue debtors with days outstanding, payment runs due, projected balance.

• Keep the company's master P&L model current — updating actuals and committed costs as they change, so the forecast reflects where the business genuinely is.

• The model is ours; you update the numbers within it. Structural or formula changes come to the CEO first.

Payroll preparation

• Prepare payroll data and submit it to the external payroll provider ahead of deadline.

• Post the payroll journal to Xero each month. Wages must not sit in a control account.

• Confirm the payroll account is funded before each run. This role does not execute payroll.

Close, deadlines and records

• Run the monthly close to a published working-day deadline: accruals prepared with supporting detail, journals posted, period locked.

• Every accrual carries a schedule — supplier, event, date of work. No balance we can't explain.

• Maintain the statutory deadline register (VAT, PAYE, corporation tax, Companies House) and flag each one in advance. No filing sits invisibly in someone else's workflow.

• Keep records orderly and audit-ready for the external accountancy firm.

What the first 90 days actually look like

We are being straight about this because we want someone who finds it interesting rather than alarming.

Lab54 has grown faster than its finance function, and we've recently changed accountants. The ledger carries a real backlog: untagged transactions across two financial years, unposted payroll journals, a month-end close that has not been run to a cadence, and a purchase-order process that has only just gone live. There is a documented correction schedule and an external FD working through it.

The first 90 days is a clean-up, not a steady state.

Days 1–30. Learn the ledger and the project-code structure. Take over reconciliation, receipt capture and PO matching. Get the weekly untagged report running.

Days 31–60. Clear the untagged backlog. Take over sales invoicing, debtor chasing and received-payment matching. Payroll preparation and the monthly payroll journal move across.

Days 61–90. Run a full month close to deadline: suspense at nil, every accrual scheduled, supplier statements reconciled. Per-project cost data becomes reportable for the first time.

After that it becomes a genuinely well-defined job inside a documented control structure — and you'll have built it.

On being in the office. The first three months are fully office-based, and that's deliberate rather than a policy position. Clearing a backlog this size means asking people questions in real time — whose card that was, what the missing PO covers, which event a supplier belongs to. That's an hour of work in a room and a week of work over email. From month 4, one of the three days moves to remote, provided the measures below are being met.

What we're looking for

Essential

• Proven bookkeeping experience. Xero to a high standard is non-negotiable — tracking categories, purchase orders, bank rules, manual journals.

• Purchase-order matching and supplier statement reconciliation as routine practice.

• A project- or job-costing background — agency, events, production, construction, consultancy, anywhere the job rather than the month is the unit of profit. This is the part of the role we can't train quickly.

• Strong reconciliation, coding and purchase-ledger discipline.

• Experience preparing payroll data for an external provider and posting the payroll journal.

• Comfortable working inside a defined control structure where you prepare and someone else approves.

• Reliability over ambition. The value of this role is that nothing is ever late or missing.

Nice to have

• Multi-currency invoicing and foreign supplier payments. We run events across Europe.

• Dext, Revolut Business, or similar capture and expense tooling.

• Experience cleaning up a ledger rather than only maintaining a tidy one.

How you'll work

• Meticulous. Proactive on receipts, POs and debtors — chasing people is part of the job, not an escalation.

• Willing to say when something doesn't look right. A number you can't explain is a question, not a rounding difference.

• Discreet and trustworthy with company finances.

• Organised to deadline without being chased yourself.

How we'll measure it

• Bank and card reconciliations — current within 48 hours, every week.

• Receipt capture with correct project coding — 98%.

• Supplier invoices matched to a PO — 100%, with exceptions escalated same day.

• Untagged transactions — zero at each week-end.

• Sales invoices raised from trigger — 95%+ within 48 hours.

• Month-end close — completed to the published working-day deadline, suspense at nil, every accrual scheduled.

• Payroll — data submitted, journal posted, account funded ahead of deadline, every cycle.

• Statutory deadlines — every one flagged in advance. Zero missed.

• Debtor days — trending down, with every overdue invoice actively chased.

• Project close — every closed project carries a final actual-versus-budget number, issued without being asked for.

• Weekly cash one-pager and master P&L — current, every week.

What's different about doing this here

• Per-event P&L, not just a company ledger. You'll see the margin on a festival takeover.

• Close to the commercial detail of a live business — 100 events a year, heavy freelancer and crew spend, international suppliers and multi-currency invoicing.

• A clear control structure. You prepare, leadership approves. Nobody asks you to do both.

• Room to grow. A Financial Controller sits above this role as the finance function builds out.