Finance Operations Manager

This role is critical to enabling reliable management reporting, clean investment narratives, operational decision-making, and future fundraising readiness. Because KPH does not currently have a bookkeeper, accountant, or financial controller, this person will need to operate independently, create structure from ambiguity, and design practical finance processes for the business.

The person in this role will be responsible for historical finance reconstruction. They will rebuild KPH’s financial history from inception using available records, consolidating records from I&M Bank, M-PESA, Kopokopo, Pesapal, Airbnb, Booking.com, Expedia, cash, and physical receipts. They will identify missing records, gaps, duplicates, and inconsistencies, and create a reliable historical ledger supported by a clear audit trail.

They will also be responsible for reconciliation. This includes reconciling channel payouts to bookings, cash receipts, and bank movements, as well as distinguishing gross revenue, commissions, fees, taxes, net payouts, refunds, chargebacks, and owner injections where relevant. A key part of the role will be reconciling actual cash received against expected income by source.

Another major responsibility will be Zoho setup and backfill. The successful candidate will populate Zoho with clean, structured historical records and establish the chart-of-accounts logic, naming conventions, tagging, classes, and source mapping needed to keep the system coherent. Their work should ensure that Zoho becomes the finance source of truth going forward.

The role will also cover finance controls and reporting. This person will design workflows for daily, weekly, and monthly finance operations, build basic management reporting packs, establish monthly close procedures and reconciliation routines, and create documentation so finance operations are repeatable rather than dependent on memory or ad hoc work.

In addition, they will be expected to produce decision-useful outputs. This includes clean profit and loss reporting, cash movement visibility, channel-level revenue visibility, and supporting schedules. They should also create financial reporting that can support management decisions, investor conversations, and future capital raising.

Within the engagement, the candidate is expected to deliver a complete inventory of all finance data sources, a reconciliation framework for each source, a cleaned historical transaction master file, and a gap log showing missing documents and unresolved items. They will also need to ensure Zoho is populated with historical records to an agreed cutoff date, and produce monthly profit and loss and cash summaries for the reconstructed period, along with revenue-by-channel summaries. The engagement should conclude with a finance SOP covering future record capture, reconciliations, and monthly close, as well as a handover pack and full documentation trail.

The ideal candidate will have at least five years of experience in accounting, finance operations, controllership, audit, or finance systems implementation. They should have proven experience cleaning up messy historical books and strong reconciliation experience across bank, wallet, payment gateway, and marketplace or OTA channels.

Experience with Zoho Books, Xero, QuickBooks, or similar systems is important, as are strong Excel or Google Sheets skills. They must be able to work with incomplete records while still producing structured outputs, and they should demonstrate strong judgment, documentation discipline, and attention to detail.

It would be especially valuable if the candidate has experience in hospitality, hotel, travel, restaurant, retail, or marketplace finance. Experience preparing businesses for investment, diligence, or audit would also be highly relevant, as would familiarity with Kenyan payment systems and tax realities. Experience handling cash-heavy or mixed-channel operations would be a strong advantage.

Success in this role will mean that Zoho becomes KPH’s trusted finance source of truth, historical financial records are substantially reconstructed and defensible, and leadership gains a much clearer view of revenue, fees, cash movement, and gaps. It will also mean that KPH has a repeatable monthly finance process and that the business is materially better prepared for investor reporting and capital raising.