Director of Finance

Reporting Structure: President & Creative Director

Functional Alignment: Strategic Finance

Cross-Functional: Operations & Business Ops

Company Overview

Unboxed Group is a global experiential creative agency that designs and produces high-impact brand experiences for the world’s most ambitious brands. Headquartered in Los Angeles with teams in New York and London, it turns strategy and concept into immersive, precisely executed work at every scale.

The agency has grown quickly, moving from a largely freelance model to a permanent in-house team while carrying a book of premieres, activations and cultural moments for entertainment, luxury and technology brands. That growth now needs a finance function built to match it, and built to scale without adding headcount for every new process.

Position Overview

The person who owns the financial engine of the agency, and builds the systems that let it run without them. As Director of Finance you own the numbers the business makes decisions on. The close, the cash position, the forecast, the budget, the cost of the team and the margin on every project. You are the first and only full-time finance hire, which means the work spans real technical depth and real hands-on execution.

It also means you are building, not inheriting. A significant part of this role is designing the systems, workflows and automation that make finance fast and accurate, using Airtable, the existing stack and AI tooling wherever it genuinely earns its place. The expectation is not that you absorb manual work. It is that you engineer it away.

You report to the President and work alongside Strategic Finance, who retains tax strategy and the highest-level financial direction. You partner daily with Operations and Business Operations.

Job Responsibilities

Planning, Forecasting & Capacity

• Own the rolling cash flow forecast and keep the cash position visible week to week, not month to month.
• Review project cash inflows and outflows weekly against client terms, flagging shortfalls before they are felt.
• Build the annual financial plan and the quarterly reforecast, and prepare the rolling twelve month budget for review by Strategic Finance.
• Provide margin visibility and profitability analysis across projects, clients and departments.
• Run scenario forecasts on revenue, margin and headcount so leadership sees the downside before it arrives.
• Maintain pricing logic, rate cards and margin floors, and flag work priced below standard before it is signed.
• Own the labor model and keep it current against headcount, rates and utilization.
• Show the true cost of internal versus freelance labor so resourcing decisions are made on evidence.
• Build the financial plan behind every proposed hire, including loaded cost, timing, payback and the effect on operating margin.
• Track billable capacity and utilization, and surface where the business is over or under-resourced.
• Partner with HR and Operations on the hiring plan, staffing economics and the people-cost model.
• Model the financial impact of office, systems and capital decisions before they are committed to.
• Own the employee compensation model, including bands by role and level, and keep it benchmarked against the market.
• Maintain the commission structure, and calculate and record sales commissions each quarter.
• Cost every offer, raise and promotion before it is made, and hold total compensation against budget.
• Support semi-annual incentive compensation planning alongside HR and Strategic Finance.
• Run the annual compensation review cycle with HR and the President, including the merit and adjustment pool.
• Keep the fully loaded cost of employment current by head and by department.
• Review and approve payroll every cycle, and hold the controls that sit behind it.
• Oversee the annual workers compensation audit with Business Operations, ensuring payroll is correctly classified by class code and the audit closes clean.
• Own annual benefits planning, including plan selection, employer cost and renewal modeling.
• Keep payroll, commissions and benefits reconciled to the general ledger every month.

Reporting, Close & Receivables

• Own the monthly close, delivering clean reconciliations on a fixed, published calendar.
• Hold a zero-aging standard on reconciliation items older than 30 days.
• Produce monthly reporting, dashboards and executive summaries for the President and leadership.
• Own the chart of accounts, project costing and the financial field logic behind both, with fee, pass-through cost and markup separately identifiable.
• Maintain budget-versus-actual reporting across departments and projects.
• Keep the finance tracker in Airtable current weekly, with WIP and budget figures recorded against every active project.
• Own accounts receivable end to end, including invoicing accuracy, aging and escalation.
• Build and maintain relationships with client-side finance, accounts payable and procurement contacts.
• Follow up with clients directly and persistently until payment lands, holding a professional, on-brand tone throughout.
• Run deposit true-ups so billing stays ahead of contracted spend on every project.
• Review every SOW for tax treatment and scope exposure before signature, pricing risk into the deal.
• Create and maintain each project in the accounting system with the correct structure from day one.
• Confirm client billing portal, invoice format and purchase order requirements before the first invoice is raised.
• Collect and track client exemption certificates and keep them current.
• Issue client invoices to each client’s required channel, format and schedule.
• Set and track vendor rebate expectations at budget stage and collect what is owed at closeout.
• Support project margin planning through the budget calculator at the point decisions are made.
• Keep project financial status current and visible to Production and Account Services.
• Set sales tax treatment by budget line at the budgeting stage, not after the fact.
• Reconcile the project at closeout, allocate internal labor and hand the result to Strategic Finance for revenue recognition.
• Process, approve and release vendor invoices daily against approved budgets.
• Troubleshoot vendor registration and payment holds so production is never blocked by finance.
• Approve reimbursements and mileage against the correct project and fund.
• Maintain vendor compliance documentation including W-9 and certificates of insurance, and onboarding records.
• Maintain and enforce the company expense policy and corporate card workflows.
• Activate new work in progress accounts in the spend platform as production-facing accounts are opened.
• Chase general ledger coding and missing receipts weekly so the ledger closes clean.
• Conduct monthly expense audits and remove redundant tools and subscriptions.

Tax, Compliance & Risk

• Maintain the sales tax decision matrix so treatment is consistent across accounts.
• Register for sales tax permits by state as event nexus is triggered, and track renewals.
• Execute the go-forward sales tax plan across every state the agency operates in.
• Accrue and remit use tax, and retain filed returns and payment confirmations against every filing.
• Assess the agency’s historical sales tax exposure and quantify it with a remediation path.
• Issue and track vendor resale certificates on qualifying purchases for resale.
• Manage all insurance policies, renewals and coverage levels, and ensure certificates are issued as required.
• Issue vendor 1099s annually and keep the underlying vendor data clean year-round.
• Partner with the agency’s outside tax firm on filings, elections and quarterly estimates.
• Stand up and run the UK financial stack, including the banking and accounting instances and the payment workflows behind them.
• Support multi-state and international compliance for finance, vendor onboarding and tax registration.

Systems, Automation & AI

• Own the financial system stack end to end, including the accounting platform, spend management and the connections between them.
• Manage users and permissions across every financial system on joiner, mover and leaver.
• Design and maintain the finance layer inside Airtable so project financials are live rather than reconstructed at month-end.
• Embed accurate financial logic into every operational system as it is built, and audit it monthly with Operations.
• Own purchase order workflows, invoicing systems, vendor onboarding and receivables processes.
• Participate in weekly systems meetings with Operations through the buildout phase.
• Eliminate manual finance work through automation rather than absorbing it into the role.
• Build documented, repeatable flows so the finance function is not dependent on one person’s habits.
• Apply AI tooling to reconciliation, coding, document handling, reporting and forecasting wherever it genuinely improves speed or accuracy.
• Review the finance tool stack continuously and retire what is redundant.
• Bring new approaches to leadership proactively rather than waiting to be asked.

Qualifications

• Experience: 8+ years of progressive finance and accounting experience, including full ownership of a close cycle and a forecast.
• Level: Controller, Director of Finance, or a senior finance manager ready to own a function end to end.
• Industry: Creative agency, production company, or another project-based business with heavy third-party vendor spend. Strongly preferred.
• Planning & Modeling: Demonstrated ownership of cash forecasting, budgeting, scenario modeling and labor or capacity models.
• Compensation & People Cost: Has owned comp bands, payroll approval, benefits renewal and the loaded-cost model inside a growing team.
• Technical Foundation: Strong command of close, reconciliation, payables and receivables, project costing, and revenue and cost matching.
• Multi-State Tax: Practical multi-state sales and use tax experience, including nexus, registration and exposure assessment. Not theoretical.
• Multi-Entity: Comfortable across a US entity and a UK arm, with the reporting, banking and compliance that come with both.
• Systems, Airtable & AI: Has built financial workflows inside systems rather than only using them, and can point to manual processes they have engineered away. Airtable is a significant advantage.
• Receivables: Track record collecting from large enterprise clients through procurement portals and long payment cycles.
• Build Orientation: Wants to build a function rather than maintain one, and is comfortable being the first full-time finance hire.
• Operating Range & Presence: Moves comfortably between planning, systems work and daily execution. Explains financial reality plainly to creative and production leaders, and holds a standard without friction.

Additional Requirements

• Flexibility around close, filing deadlines and heavy production periods.
• Occasional travel for team or client requirements.
• Pay: $140,000 – $170,000 per year
• Time Off: Unlimited PTO to ensure you stay refreshed and inspired.
• Benefits: Health Insurance & 401k enrollment options.

Unboxed Group, LLC is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law.