Sr. Allocation Accountant (Consultant)

About the role

The ideal candidate is a builder and a self-starter who is energized by creating structure in green-field projects. We value sharp judgment, structured thinking, and the ability to learn adjacent technical areas quickly over a perfect checklist of prior credentials. Someone who has stood up a methodology once and is comfortable bringing order to ambiguity will thrive here.

Responsibilities

• Work with the Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) to understand work performed to date, including interviews with department owners to identify the nature of each cost pool and determine which activities genuinely benefit subsidiaries.
• Review shared-service costs incurred to date and determine the best approach to identify and segregate these costs in the system (e.g., through correct invoice coding, routing payroll costs to shared-service business units) prior to applying allocation methodologies.
• Design a defensible allocation methodology, selecting the right driver for each pool (headcount, revenue, usage, licenses, spend, etc.).
• Formalize these processes in a formal allocation policy that documents the approach for audit, tax, and repeatability. Currently, a draft policy has been started and workshopped with a Big 4 accounting firm but is in its early stages.
• Help establish treatment for centralized labor and for capitalized cloud/IT costs (for in-house IT system designers) that are capitalized and amortized/cross-charged over time via IT service fees.
• Validate the methodology with subsidiary and functional stakeholders, then execute allocations across entities—directly in Dynamics 365 (D365) where available and via Excel for entities that are not, with results flowing into D365 for intercompany invoicing.
• Build a repeatable, well-documented process that an internal owner can eventually run on an ongoing basis.

Requirements

• Demonstrated experience designing and implementing cost allocation procedures from scratch—not simply running an existing one.
• A track record of partnering with cost-center owners to distinguish shared vs. direct costs and building tailored allocation drivers per pool.
• Strong technical accounting foundation (CPA preferred) with the ability to produce audit-ready, defensible documentation.
• Ability to utilize in-house AI tools (Copilot, with Claude Opus and Chat GPT models available in our secure environment) to accelerate the project rather than spending excessive time on memo/policy writing.
• Comfort operating hands-on in Excel and within an ERP environment (D365 a plus) and backend reporting tools, including moving data cleanly between systems.
• Senior enough to own auditor and stakeholder relationships and drive a project independently with limited hand-holding.

Nice-to-haves

• Exposure to transfer pricing and intercompany cross-charging (OECD guidelines, IRC §482). While we do not expect a transfer-pricing specialist (our Tax/Treasury team will guide the technical framework), the individual must be intellectually curious and able to learn these concepts quickly on the job.
• Familiarity with capitalization and amortization of cloud/internal-use software, or the ability to quickly understand the mechanics of charging it out over time.
• Experience across multiple ERP systems or in a multinational, multi-entity environment.