Staff Accountant

About the role

Northwest Ambulance is building its accounting department from the ground up. Everything was outsourced; now it is not. We have a Controller, an Accounting Manager, and a Payroll Manager. This seat is the fourth, and it exists because three things need an owner: the money going out, proving that the money coming in was recorded correctly, and a trained second person who can run payroll when the Payroll Manager cannot. This is not a role where you process a queue someone else designed. The processes are being built now, and you will help build them: how invoices get coded, how the vendor file is maintained, and how we prove each month that what our billing company says it collected is what actually reached the bank. We are a growing ground ambulance company with roughly 430 employees across four Washington locations, about 350 payable documents a month, and a revenue cycle that runs through a third-party billing partner. The work is real and there is a lot of it. This is a full-time, non-exempt (hourly, overtime-eligible) position reporting to the Accounting Manager, on-site at our Everett administrative office.

Responsibilities

• Accounts payable, end to end: enter and code vendor invoices against the chart of accounts and the correct department.
• Match each invoice to its purchase authorization and to confirmation that the goods or services actually arrived, and resolve differences before anything is paid.
• Prepare the weekly payment run for approval and release, and submit the approved payment file to the bank.
• Maintain vendor records: current W-9, correct remit-to address, payment terms, and reporting status; verify new banking or remittance details by callback to an independently sourced number.
• Prepare the 1099 reporting file at year end.
• Code roughly 150 card transactions a month, chase the receipts, and reconcile each statement.
• Revenue reconciliation: each month prove that cash deposited at the bank, cash our billing partner says it posted, and revenue recorded in the general ledger agree; prepare the accounts receivable rollforward and aging; investigate differences and bring them to the Accounting Manager with an explanation.
• Patient refunds and credit balances: receive refund packets from the billing partner, verify them against the account, prepare refund checks, and track the statutory clock on each one; identify credit balances monthly and flag anything approaching a refund or unclaimed property deadline.
• Outstanding checks and reconciling items: age the outstanding check list monthly and work it down; carry reconciling items on the difference log with a cause, an owner, and a date, and close them.
• Payroll backup: train to run a full payroll cycle in ADP (approved time exported from our scheduling system, roughly 430 employees across two states) and be ready to run it on short notice.
• Supporting the close: prepare assigned balance sheet reconciliations to a standard workpaper format on the published close calendar; prepare recurring journal entries for review; pull support when our CPA firm asks for it.

Requirements

• Associate's degree in accounting (required)
• 2+ years of full-cycle accounts payable or general accounting experience
• Ability to reconcile an account to an independent source and trace a difference to its cause without being handed the answer
• Solid Excel skills, including lookups and pivot tables, and comfort working with a few thousand rows of data
• QuickBooks experience, or a demonstrated ability to pick up a new accounting system quickly
• Accuracy with volume: this role handles several hundred documents a month, and accuracy matters more than speed
• The habit of asking when something looks wrong rather than coding it and moving on
• Willingness to be trained to run payroll and to be relied on as the backup
• Discretion with confidential