Be part of Australia’s leading startup-focused accounting and CFO firm, dedicated to doing things differently.
Are you a CFO or senior finance leader who loves working directly with founders? Maybe you’re coming from another advisory or professional services firm and want deeper client impact, better clients, and more autonomy.
Either way, this is an opportunity to play a senior, visible role in growing our Sydney presence while delivering high-quality fractional CFO services to some of Australia’s most ambitious startups and scaleups.
The opportunity
Standard Ledger is continuing to grow, and we’re looking for a Sydney-based CFO to join our team and support a portfolio of venture-backed and high-growth clients.
Sydney is where much of Australia’s startup capital is raised, and this role sits right in the middle of that ecosystem. Your primary focus will be client service delivery – acting as a trusted fractional CFO to founders and leadership teams.
For the right person, there is also the opportunity to participate in the growth of the firm. While this is not a business development role, we do value people who are active in the startup ecosystem, build strong networks, and occasionally help bring new CFO relationships into the firm. Where that happens, there is meaningful upside available, structured simply and transparently.
You’ll be supported by a highly capable delivery team across Australia and offshore, allowing you to focus on advisory, judgement and relationships rather than pure production.
What you’ll do
A little more about us
Standard Ledger is an accounting and CFO firm focused on startups and scaleups, born in Australia, operating in the UK for the past three years, with a strong back-end FinOps team in the Philippines. We work alongside our clients as part of their teams, combining strong fundamentals with modern systems, smart tooling and increasingly automated workflows.
We’re operators first, accountants second. We lean into better ways of working, and we give our people the space to do meaningful advisory work with great clients.
Requirements
About you
You’re a senior finance professional with strong judgement and presence, and you genuinely enjoy working with clients.
Ideally, you:
You’re commercial, pragmatic and not precious. You care about helping businesses grow, not just producing technically correct answers.
Benefits
We’re flexible on structure and timing for the right person, and we’ll support a thoughtful transition into the role.
As well as the core base salary, there's also the possibility of sharing some of the growth upside if you're up for that, as well as the possibility of owning part of the bigger picture with equity in our business via an employee share scheme.
OUR STORY SO FAR About six years ago, we set out to do things differently. We knew startups and fast-growing SMEs needed scalable accounting services, freeing them up for bigger things. And with our operational CFO experience, we knew we could help with those bigger things too, like capital raising, financial management, valuations and cash injections from R&D tax and grants.In other words: we knew we could build the leading accounting and CFO service for startups in Australia and – spoiler alert – we reckon we have (just quietly). We’ve helped founders make amazing products, like the world’s first self-sterilising baby bottle, by freeing them up to focus on their business not their bookkeeping. We’ve helped startups like Choovie and Pronto Bottle with equity crowdfunding; secured millions of dollars in R&D funding for tech startups; and helped others like Piiq Digital and Waterwerx raise investor capital. Above all, we’ve been there at every stage of our clients’ growth, helping them build businesses with the potential to transform their lives. That’s what running your own business is all about. We get it because we’re doing it too and now we’re forging on, into our next phase.WHERE WE'RE GOINGWe work with hundreds of founders and business owners in Australia and in the last few years, we’ve helped several of them expand into New Zealand, Canada, the US and the UK. And that gave us an idea. Like most founders (and unlike traditional accountants), we feel the adventurous pull of growth. For us that means doubling down on our service to work with more founders and fast-growing businesses here in Australia, and looking at whether our model will work overseas as well.We’re a tech company at heart (with an accountant’s eye and operator’s mind), so we believe most things are scalable if you have the right tech, systems and people. Speaking of people…HERE'S WHY YOU MIGHT WANT TO JOIN USLong before COVID-19, we were proof that remote teams can work. We’ve built our business from co-working spaces in Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and Brisbane, where we’ve become part of local startup ecosystems and helped interesting people do innovative things. And we’ve been backed by our support team in Manila – yes, they’re offshore but we’ve made sure they don’t feel it. The first six years have flown for our founders, Remco and Mike, and as we’ve grown we’ve kept our tech ethos of listening and evolving (but we still wear t-shirts, most of the time).All of which is to say that working with us is very much the modern job experience. You’ll know what you’re responsible for and you’ll do it in the way and place that suits you. As a startup originally, we attract people who like to dig in and get the job done without having to navigate too many layers of management. You’ll also work with entrepreneurial clients doing genuinely groundbreaking things, including in the for-purpose and environmental sectors, which makes the day to day that much more enjoyable.We work at a reasonably fast pace but we also have families and lives outside work, and we want you to as well. We’re keen to even up the gender imbalance in financial services and we’re happy to discuss what you would need to make a role with us work for you. We’re also an endorsed WORK180 employer as part of our commitment to improving workplaces for women.And for a little more about us, head to our about page or read our full founder story.
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Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Q&A's