Senior Finance Director

This position is available for fully remote work, but you must live in a time zone between US Eastern Time and GMT. Preference will be given to candidates in or who can relocate to the Washington, DC area.The Senior Finance Director is our most senior financial leader. This role will work closely with the rest of the senior leadership team and participate in strategic planning. The right person for this role will be used to working with highly distributed global teams serving customers in 30+ countries and 4 continents.
Sparkmeter is still pre-series B and we have plenty of organizational capability building to do. This is a role for someone who enjoys implementing systems, process and driving change.Sparkmeter is a VC funded start up in the energy technology space. We sell a hardware enabled software platform and additional software only products to Microgrid developers and grid management utilities. Our existing customer base is in emerging markets in Africa and Central Asia with aspirations to grow into the US market.
As Senior Finance Director, you'll focus on:
- Managing the FP&A process. You’ll develop a monthly budgeting and forecasting model that looks ahead at least twelve months. The model will bring in sales projections, departmental budgets and hiring plans, and planned capital expenditures to help the company make key strategic decisions. You will oversee a system to:
- analyze actual financial performance based on monthly updates of the latest actual inputs from the business, such as actual cash collections vs. expected, actual recognized revenue vs. expected, actual inventory vs. expected, actual runway vs. expected, and actual margin vs. expected.
- inform the business of optimizations or opportunities to improve financial performance and runway. This would include analyzing future revenue based on product in WIP and perform investigative analysis of variation from expected revenue collection to reveal improvement opportunities to speed up our revenue recognition process or improve revenue projection accuracy.
- Trigger alarms around financial performance, such as risks to company runway, and analyze potential solutions, such as deferrals or changes to hiring plans or capital expenditures.
- Calculate working capital requirements to support necessary levels of inventory to support sales projections.
- Accurately track and manage unit economics, including price, COGS, and margin, and present Sales and Operations team with guidance on price discounts and COGS improvements to improve unit gross margin.
- Maintain proactive contingency plans if cash runway goes below 6 months.
- Be the financial voice of excellence in project and business case financial analysis. Lead through serving others in the projects they own to ensure financial excellence is planned for and achieved.
- Maintaining a system for budgeting, tax compliance, and board or investor reporting. This will require that you:
- Develop annual budgets and updates on a quarterly basis with each department head.
- Oversee the preparation of monthly financial close and reporting to the executive team.
- Prepare financial update slides for Board meetings every two months.
- Prepare quarterly financial updates for investors as per their specific reporting requirements and other ad hoc requests
- Lead and optimize our global tax processes and ensure global legal compliance.
- Serve as the POC for our recurring financial Audit cycles
- Establish and maintain a delegation of authority to empower spending efficiency
- Partner with the CEO to execute on investment or debt fundraising:
- Establish and grow as needed a working capital facility that ensure our cash level does not drop below acceptable thresholds due to timing issues between payments and collections.
- Establish and maintain Investor data rooms as needed
- Support potential and existing investor requests as needed
- Maintain and manage our Cap table and Carta Equity management system, including equity awards.
- Maintain a five-year financial pro forma model for planning and capital raising purposes with bi-annual updates.

• Manage the administrative functions including AP/AR:
• Envision and implement an accounting system that empowers cost and on the fly analysis and the following capabilities - Blanket Purchase Orders - Open Purchase Order Report - Receivables Aging
  • Actual vs estimated cost tracking
  • Update and maintain our General Ledger of accounts to best match our business financial management and analysis needs
  • Contribute to a productive and effective S&OP process
  • Improve, maintain and execute our Accounts Payable System and processes
  • Serve as the Finance department point of contact for systems integrations that require integrating with our financial system
  • Maintain a set of financial reports and analysis to respond to our ongoing and future business needs
  • Ensure our collections are at or below our target threshold
• Be a contributor to the senior leadership team: > Contribute to the continuous improvement culture of Sparkmeter > Energetically engage and contribute to other functions improvement initiatives where financial team support is needed > Serve as a negotiation “heavy” for critical negotiations Requirements
• Experience working for organizations that have scaled from $10M in revenue to $100M+ or resulted in a successful exit.
• Start up experience: Have led the implementation or overhaul of an accounting and financial management system in a venture capital funded environment pre Series B for a manufacturing OEM with both proprietary hardware and software.
• Equity capital raise experience from Series A rounds and beyond, with a track record of raising at least $100M venture capital equity.
• Small scale debt capital raise experience of <$20M
• Comfortable in stressful environments
• Servant leadership
• Positive, attentive and energetic co-worker