Role Overview
Karen Plains Hotel is seeking a highly capable Finance Operations Manager to build our finance foundation from zero to one. This is not a routine bookkeeping role. The successful candidate will lead the end-to-end historical reconstruction of our financial records from the hotel's inception, and reconcile revenue and cash movements across all sources.
This role is critical to enabling reliable management reporting, clean investment narratives, operational decision-making, and future fundraising readiness. Because KPH does not currently have a bookkeeper, accountant, or financial controller, this person will need to operate independently, create structure from ambiguity, and design practical finance processes for the business.
Qualifications
Experience Level
Senior Level
Experience Required
5+ Years
Working Hours
Full Time
Key Responsibilities
1. Historical Finance Reconstruction
- Rebuild KPH's financial history from inception using all available records
- Consolidate records from I&M Bank, M-PESA, Kopokopo, Pesapal, Airbnb, Booking.com, Expedia, cash, and physical receipts
- Identify missing records, gaps, duplicates, and inconsistencies
- Create a reliable historical ledger supported by a clear audit trail
2. Reconciliation
- Reconcile channel payouts to bookings, cash receipts, and bank movements
- Distinguish gross revenue, commissions, fees, taxes, net payouts, refunds, chargebacks, and owner injections
- Reconcile actual cash received against expected income by source
3. Zoho Setup & Backfill
- Populate Zoho with clean, structured historical records
- Establish chart-of-accounts logic, naming conventions, tagging, classes, and source mapping
- Ensure Zoho becomes the finance source of truth going forward
4. Finance Controls & Reporting
- Design workflows for daily, weekly, and monthly finance operations
- Build basic management reporting packs
- Establish monthly close procedures and reconciliation routines
- Create documentation so finance operations are repeatable, not dependent on memory or ad hoc work
5. Decision-Useful Outputs
- Produce clean profit and loss reporting, cash movement visibility, and channel-level revenue visibility
- Create supporting schedules and financial reporting to support management decisions
- Prepare investor-ready reporting and support future capital raising conversations
Expected Deliverables
- Complete inventory of all finance data sources and a reconciliation framework for each
- Cleaned historical transaction master file and gap log showing missing documents and unresolved items
- Zoho populated with historical records to an agreed cutoff date
- Monthly profit and loss and cash summaries for the reconstructed period
- Revenue-by-channel summaries
- Finance SOP covering future record capture, reconciliations, and monthly close
- Full handover pack and documentation trail
Required Skills & Experience
Must Have
- 5+ years in accounting, finance operations, controllership, audit, or finance systems implementation
- Proven experience cleaning up messy historical books
- Strong reconciliation experience across bank, wallet, payment gateway, and OTA channels
- Experience with Zoho Books, Xero, QuickBooks, or similar
- Strong Excel or Google Sheets skills
- Ability to work with incomplete records and produce structured outputs
- Strong judgment, documentation discipline, and attention to detail
Nice to Have
- Experience in hospitality, hotel, travel, restaurant, or marketplace finance
- Experience preparing businesses for investment, diligence, or audit
- Familiarity with Kenyan payment systems and tax realities
- Experience handling cash-heavy or mixed-channel operations
What Success Looks Like
- Zoho becomes KPH's trusted finance source of truth
- Historical financial records are substantially reconstructed and defensible
- Leadership gains a clear view of revenue, fees, cash movement, and gaps
- KPH has a repeatable monthly finance process
- The business is materially better prepared for investor reporting and capital raising
Compensation
- USD 4,000 – 6,000 per month (negotiable based on experience)
- Performance-based commission structure
- Opportunity to build the finance function from the ground up
- Direct access to leadership and meaningful impact on the business
How to Apply
Send your application with the following materials:
- CV / Resume
- Brief note on a messy finance reconstruction or reconciliation project you've led
- Why Karen Plains Hotel, and why now
Send Application →