Senior Accountant, Treasury & Payments

ABOUT ARBOREAL

Arboreal Management is a fast-growing, tech-enabled and fully integrated real estate platform for the Pacific Northwest, primarily focused on affordable housing. We develop, remodel and manage housing that addresses our region’s most critical needs. Our mission: deliver below-market rents to residents while achieving above-market returns for investors.

• Arboreal Management — property management, 8,000+ apartment homes.

• Arboreal Construction — in-house construction, renovations and ground-up projects.

• Great Expectations — development and investment platform; 120+ investors, 20 projects delivered.

THE ROLE

We are hiring a Senior Accountant to own treasury and payment processing for a portfolio spanning several hundred property and ownership entities. Cash sits in many accounts across many owners, and every payment, transfer and lender debit has to land in the right one, on time, recorded correctly on both sides, with a clean audit trail.

This role is for an accountant, not only an operator. You will run the daily cash and payment calendar, and you will also book what moved, reconcile it and be able to defend it to an owner, a lender or an auditor. You will not have unilateral release authority — every outgoing payment is prepared by you and approved by someone else — but you will be the person who knows, at any hour, where the cash is, what is about to move and whether the books agree.

We move quickly and the work does not arrive in a neat queue. We want someone who sets their own priorities, closes their own loops and tells us early when something will not make it, without waiting to be asked. You will also support moves between banking partners as relationships change, and help set up ACH and lender auto-payments when a property comes on.

WHAT YOU WILL OWN

Cash positioning and bank reconciliation

• Maintain the daily and weekly cash position across all managed bank accounts, by entity and by ownership group.

• Reconcile bank activity to the general ledger and clear differences rather than noting them; keep reconciling items current and aged.

• Flag accounts trending toward shortfall far enough ahead that funding decisions can still be made calmly.

• Keep the account inventory accurate — openings, closings, signers, ownership changes and entity renames.

Payment decisions and processing

• Apply our payment rules to approved bills: review what is due against available cash by property and decide approve, hold or partial-pay, with the reasoning stated.

• Prioritize by exposure rather than by age: utilities at shutoff risk, taxes and insurance, debt service and lien-capable vendors ahead of discretionary spend.

• Build payment batches for approval, then release and record them once approved.

• Send bills that look duplicated, miscoded or unsupported back to the AP team before they are paid, rather than paying and correcting later.

• Answer vendor questions about payment status and timing.

Wires, ACH and lender administration

• Prepare wires and ACH transactions for review and approval, with complete supporting documentation attached.

• Verify payee banking details against an independent source before a payment is queued, and apply our callback verification standard to any new or changed instruction.

• Track same-day cutoffs across our banking partners, confirm settlement, and follow returns, rejects and recalls through to resolution.

• Complete and maintain lender banking forms and ACH debit authorizations, and keep a current register of which lender debits which account, on what day, for what amount.

• Help with ACH setup forms and lender auto-payment setup for new properties, and confirm the first payment debits the right account.

Debt service and intercompany funding

• Track scheduled debt service by property and by lender: due date, amount, funding account and clearing status.

• Identify upcoming payments the property’s own cash will not cover, and assemble the funding options for review.

• Record loan payments, escrow activity and transfers between related entities on both sides, and reconcile due-to and due-from balances so they agree.

• Reconcile what was scheduled against what actually cleared, every cycle, and escalate the exceptions.

Month-end close and audit support

• Prepare journal entries and accruals for cash, payment, intercompany and debt activity, with support a reviewer can follow without asking.

• Reconcile cash, intercompany and loan balances at month end and deliver them on the close calendar.

• Prepare audit-ready workpapers and respond to requests from external auditors, lenders and owners.

• Spot errors upstream — duplicate payments, payments booked to the wrong entity, transfers recorded on one side only — and fix the cause, not just the entry.

Bank transitions

• Support account migrations between banking partners, and keep the cutover tracker current daily — what has moved, what is pending, and what is still debiting the old account.

• Confirm every recurring debit, autopay and transfer has been repointed before an old account is closed. This step is where transitions fail, and it will be yours to get right.

Process and controls

• Write and maintain the procedures for the work you own, so anyone on the team can pick it up.

• Tighten controls where you find gaps, and bring audit-grade documentation habits to day-to-day work.

• Help us automate repetitive treasury and payment work, testing new tools and payment rails before live volume runs through them.

WHAT YOU BRING

Required

• A bachelor’s degree in accounting, or in finance with substantial accounting coursework.

• Five or more years of progressive accounting experience, including at least two years in public accounting (audit or assurance).

• A background in accounts payable and in treasury or cash management, including hands-on execution of wires and ACH.

• Experience managing cash and payments across a large number of bank accounts, legal entities and distinct clients at the same time — not a single-entity cash cycle. This is the single most important qualification for the role.

• A solid command of accrual accounting: you can prepare and support journal entries, accruals and reconciliations without a template to follow.

• Self-direction in a fast-paced environment: you plan your own week, keep many parallel obligations straight without being reminded, and re-prioritize calmly when something urgent lands.

• Advanced Excel: lookups, pivots, reconciliation to the penny, and comfort building a working file someone else can follow.

• Strong written English and the confidence to raise a problem early, in writing, without being asked.

• A reconciliation mindset: an unexplained variance is something to chase down, not to annotate.

• A reliable home working setup — stable high-speed internet, a quiet workspace, and a backup connection — to support a six-hour Pacific overlap.

Strongly preferred

• An active CPA license (Philippine or US).

• Real estate or property management accounting background, including trust or client-funds handling. Preferred, not required — we will teach the real estate context to a strong accountant.

• Hands-on work in AppFolio, or a comparable property management accounting platform.

• Experience with commercial bank portals, positive pay and ACH origination files.

• Exposure to lender servicing, loan payment administration or covenant reporting.

• A track record of writing the procedure for work you were the first to do, and of using automation or AI tools to take manual steps out of a process.

HOW WE WORK

• Segregation of duties is absolute. You prepare and document; an approver releases. Nobody, at any level, works around this.

• Payment instruction changes are verified by callback to a known contact, never by reply to the email that requested the change.

• Client funds are client funds. Entity boundaries are never crossed to solve a timing problem.

• You own your work end to end. We would rather hear about a problem early from you than late from a vendor, a lender or an owner.

• Recurring work gets written down. We would rather spend an hour documenting a process than repeat a month of guesswork.

ENGAGEMENT TERMS

• This is an independent contractor engagement, not employment. You invoice us for hours worked and are responsible for your own taxes and statutory contributions in your country of residence.

• Company-paid benefits, leave accrual and statutory employment entitlements do not apply to a contractor engagement.

• You supply your own computer and internet connection. We provide software licenses and system access.

• We will ask you to complete a Form W-8BEN so we can document your non-US status for tax purposes.

TO APPLY

Send your resume together with a short note covering two things: the largest number of bank accounts and legal entities you have managed cash and payments across at one time, and one example — from public accounting or industry — of an error you caught before it became someone else’s problem, and what you changed so it would not happen again.