Bookkeeper

Bookkeeper — Lab54 Location: London. All 3 days in office for the first three months. From month 4, 1 day per week remote once the agreed targets are being met. Shape: Part-time, 3 days per week. Permanent or contract — both considered. Salary: £30–34k FTE equivalent, pro-rata (£18–20.5k at 3 days). Contract equivalent £150–200 per day. Reports to: Financial Controller (interim: Managing Director) Start: As soon as available About Lab54 Lab54 is a content-led events and production company: [Anywhere But A Club.] We create high-impact experiences in unexpected locations, capture them, and turn them into content. Combined global audience of 425,000+. We work with brands, record labels and artists — around 100 events a year across brand activations, artist pop-ups, hard-ticket shows, house parties and festival takeovers. The role The Bookkeeper is Lab54's day-to-day finance function: reconciliation, purchase-order matching, receipt capture, invoicing, debtor chasing and payroll preparation. The defining feature of the job is that every pound has to land against an event. Lab54's core financial object isn't the month — it's the project. Each event carries a code (YYMM-Owner-Event-City) that runs from HubSpot through Xero, Teamwork and the purchase-order flow. Coding transactions to that project is not admin; it's the thing that makes per-event profitability computable. It is the single most important part of this role. This role prepares, never approves. All payment runs are approved by the Managing Director, with the CEO approving above an agreed threshold. Responsibilities Purchase orders and supplier ledger Match supplier invoices to their purchase order in Xero. This is a manual link, and it is the control that stops us paying more than we agreed. Enforce the PO rule at the front door: any commitment of £500 or more needs a PO, and an invoice arriving without a PO number goes back to the supplier rather than into the ledger. Prepare payment runs for approval. Nothing leaves the business without a bill, a PO and a sign-off. Reconcile supplier statements monthly against our purchase ledger — the check that catches duplicate invoices and payments before they're made. Maintain the purchase ledger and keep the aged creditor position accurate. Reconciliation and coding Bank and card reconciliations kept current within 48 hours, including Revolut Business card spend against Xero tracking categories. Every reconciled line matched to a real source document. A line that reconciles without a bill behind it is an exception to raise, not a box to tick. Code every transaction to the correct project code and tracking category. Chase the team when a code is missing rather than guessing one. Keep the suspense and uncoded accounts at nil by month-end. Produce a weekly untagged-spend report, by spender, and drive it to zero. Receipts and VAT recovery Chase and capture missing receipts to a 98% target. This is a cash exercise, not a filing one — every missing VAT invoice is input VAT we can't reclaim. Flag transactions carrying no VAT treatment where the supplier is UK VAT-registered. Prepare the VAT return workings for the external accountancy firm, who own submission. Sales invoicing and debtors Raise client invoices within 48 hours of the billing trigger, coded to the project. Own debtor chasing end to end — a consistent cycle, escalated when it stalls, so nobody else in the business is carrying it. Match incoming receipts to the right invoice and contact. Money that arrives against the wrong customer looks identical to money that never arrived. Keep sales invoice sequencing clean — anything voided or reissued carries a recorded reason. Project close When a project closes, produce its final position: budgeted cost against actual cost, budgeted revenue against invoiced revenue, and the resulting margin. Issue that to the CEO and Operations Director as a matter of routine. It is not a report anyone should have to request. Late costs land after an event has finished — that's the nature of the business. The job is to make sure they land against the right project and that the closing number reflects them. Cash and reporting Produce a weekly cash one-pager: bank position, overdue debtors with days outstanding, payment runs due, projected balance. Keep the company's master P&L model current — updating actuals and committed costs as they change, so the forecast reflects where the business genuinely is. The model is ours; you update the numbers within it. Structural or formula changes come to the CEO first. Payroll preparation Prepare payroll data and submit it to the external payroll provider ahead of deadline. Post the payroll journal to Xero each month. Wages must not sit in a control account. Confirm the payroll account is funded before each run. This role does not execute payroll. Close, deadlines and records Run the monthly close to a published working-day deadline: accruals prepared with supporting detail, journals post…