Sr Cost Analyst

About the role

Robert Half is partnering with an established and successful manufacturing client to hire a Senior Manufacturing Cost Accountant. This highly visible position reports directly to the CFO and will play an important role in strengthening product costing, pricing analysis, margin visibility, and overall profitability. This is an excellent opportunity for an experienced manufacturing cost accountant who enjoys digging into the numbers, identifying opportunities, and working directly with senior leadership. Rather than simply maintaining cost accounting records, this individual will help leadership understand profitability by product, program, and customer and provide actionable insight to improve business performance.

Responsibilities

• Own and maintain standard costing for manufactured products, including material, labor, and overhead.
• Develop product-, program-, and customer-level margin and profitability analysis.
• Partner directly with the CFO to identify margin opportunities, investigate unfavorable trends, and recommend corrective actions.
• Perform cost rollups and review BOMs, routings, labor rates, overhead assumptions, and production costs.
• Analyze purchase price, labor, overhead, scrap, usage, and manufacturing variances.
• Support quoting and customer pricing decisions with accurate cost and margin information.
• Monitor existing pricing arrangements and identify situations where costs or margins have changed materially.
• Partner with operations, purchasing, engineering, and finance to improve costing accuracy.
• Support month-end close activities involving inventory, COGS, accruals, and cost-related journal entries.
• Assist with physical inventories, cycle counts, reconciliations, and inventory controls.
• Prepare financial and operational analysis for the CFO and executive leadership.
• Help improve costing processes, reporting, controls, and management visibility.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Accounting, Finance, or related discipline.
• 5+ years of progressive manufacturing cost accounting experience.
• Strong knowledge of standard costing, BOMs, inventory, cost rollups, and manufacturing variance analysis.
• Experience working within a manufacturing ERP environment; Plex experience is highly desirable.

Skills

• Advanced Excel and financial modeling/analysis skills.
• Ability to translate detailed cost information into clear business recommendations.
• Strong analytical, problem-solving, communication, and organizational skills.
• Comfortable working independently and interacting directly with executive leadership.
• Automotive, industrial, or component manufacturing experience is a plus.

Benefits

• Medical, vision, dental, and life and disability insurance
• 401(k) plan eligibility
• Free online training