What would it take for a financial controller to hand you a company's payables and reconciliations and never need to check behind you?
On a typical day you might clear the team's reimbursement queue and prepare a supplier payment run in Xero in the morning, work a Stripe settlement mismatch down to its source after lunch, and send the Financial Controller a balance sheet workpaper with a flagged query and your recommended fix before the end of day.
About Contour
We started in 2020 with a handful of students and a belief that great education should not be out of reach. Today we operate across three brands with 8,000+ students and 425+ team members: roughly 100 in India and 325 onshore in Australia. The India team runs publishing, student experience, CRM and technology, operations, and people and culture, and this role sits with the group finance function.
Every company at this scale runs on someone who keeps the money side exact. This is that seat.
About This Role
You are the accountant who runs Contour's transactional finance day to day: accounts payable, team member expense reimbursements, and account reconciliations, with balance sheet management as the part that stretches you. The balance sheet work is also why this role needs a qualified accountant rather than a bookkeeper. You report to the Financial Controller, who owns statutory reporting, tax, and sign-off on the monthly close. Everything underneath is yours: what gets paid, what gets reimbursed, and whether every account reconciles.
Two habits separate a strong hire here from a competent one. First, judgement about when to ask and when to act: you raise a blocker early instead of sitting on it, you do not guess on anything material, and once you have the answer you execute without follow-up. Second, you treat an unreconciled difference as a problem to run to ground, not a number to plug.
You start solo in group finance. The work grows with your tenure: management accounting first, then analytical and reporting work, and over time designing the processes rather than running them.
The role matters now because the volume is real: supplier invoices, team member expense claims, and student payments settling through Stripe every day, all of which has to be accurate and on time. By the end of month three, you will have accounts payable and reimbursements running on a predictable cycle with no backlog, bank and Stripe reconciliations current, balance sheet accounts reconciled monthly with workpapers ready for review, and the recurring work documented well enough that someone else could run it from your notes. What you build in those first months becomes how Contour runs this function as it scales.
Where the work lives
Xero: the ledger lives here, so clean coding, up-to-date bank feeds, and tidy reconciliations are the baseline.
Stripe: student payments settle here, so settlements and fees get reconciled back to Xero, line by line.
HubSpot and monday.com: the rest of the business runs here, so billing queries and task status move through them, and updating your status there is how a remote team stays coordinated.
What You Will Do
Run accounts payable end to end. Verify supplier invoices, code them correctly in Xero, prepare payment runs, and keep suppliers paid on time.
Process team member expense reimbursements. Check claims against policy, query anything that does not look right, and keep turnaround predictable so people are not left waiting on their own money.
Own account reconciliations. Bank accounts, Stripe settlements, and key ledger accounts, kept current every month.
Manage balance sheet accounts. Maintain the reconciliations and workpapers that support the monthly close, and flag anything material to the Financial Controller before close week.
Be the day-to-day contact for auditors. Pull samples, walk them through the workpapers, and keep internal controls tight enough to hold up under inspection.
Document what you run. Turn the recurring work into written steps so the function stays reliable as it grows.
If a better way exists to do something we are doing manually, make the case and we will back it.
Requirements
What You Need
A commerce degree plus CA Inter, CMA Inter, or part-qualified ACCA (discontinued is fine), or an M.Com, and 2 to 4 years of hands-on accounting work
Reconciliation experience across bank, supplier, or settlement accounts
Working proficiency in Xero: coding transactions, running bank feeds and reconciliations, and pulling reports without help
Balance sheet exposure: you have maintained balance sheet reconciliations or prepared workpapers for a month-end close
Sharp written English and comfort working across the India and Australia time difference. Much of your work with the Financial Controller is asynchronous, so a written query or a workpaper note has to land as intended the first time
Nice to Have
Australian accounting exposure: GST, BAS, or work for Australian clients
Experience supporting a statutory audit
Reconciliation work with Stripe or another payment platform
Experience in a startup or multi-brand environment
The Kind of People Who Thrive Here
The people who do well here see a gap and close it without being asked, holding the bar even when the clock is short. They give a direct read on the work in front of them, including when it's wrong, and when their own idea doesn't hold up, they say so and bring a better one. They build something that keeps running after they step back. Problems here don't show up on schedule or in the same shape twice, and they'd rather make the right call on limited information than let something break while they wait for a sign-off. That's the job. They name the blocker and the ask the moment they have it, on a call or a text, because decisions get made on the information you bring.
Contour's current cluster heads started as team leads. The path from operator to leader is real here.
What good looks like
Nothing needs chasing: suppliers and team members get paid without following up.
The close is boring: month-end arrives with nothing left to find.
Trusted at a distance: the Financial Controller knows where things stand without having to ask.
Benefits
Fully remote, anywhere in India. Compensation is competitive and benchmarked to the role and your experience, and we discuss it openly early in the process. From application to offer: a short screen, a technical assessment, a culture conversation with our People team, and a final interview with the Financial Controller, in about four weeks.
Apply with a CV and one short paragraph on a discrepancy you caught during a reconciliation: how you spotted it and what you did next.
