Strategic Finance & Operations Manager

About Lula

Lula Commerce is a fast-growing SaaS and marketplace platform for the convenience retail industry. We work with some of the largest convenience chains in the country, along with thousands of independent operators, to run their digital ordering, delivery, and retail data infrastructure.

We run several revenue models at the same time — subscriptions, revenue-share partnerships, GMV-based programs, and project work — and roughly 7,200 billing, payout, and collections items move through the business every month.

Almost all of that is manual today. That is the problem you are here to solve.

The Role

This role has two halves, and we want to be direct about both.

The first half is operational and hands-on. You will run billing, collections, and partner payouts. You will reconcile numbers across Stripe, ACH, Bill.com, partner reports, and our own product data. You will chase overdue accounts and untangle the payout disputes that come with a business this size. For the first stretch, this work will be real, repetitive, and high-volume.

The second half is why we think the right person will want this job. You are expected to systematically eliminate that first half. We want someone who reaches for SQL, Python, Claude Code, and automation tooling by instinct — who looks at a manual reconciliation process and thinks in terms of the script that should be doing it. The measure of success here is how much of your own workload you have automated away, and what you were able to take on with the time you got back.

Underneath both halves is a third expectation: you become the person we come to when a question needs a real answer. Before a partner negotiation, a pricing decision, or a board meeting, we should be able to hand you a messy problem and get back a clear one — here is the data, here is what it says, here is what it means for the business, here is what I would do.

You will report directly to the CEO and work closely with the CPO, our outsourced accounting team, Sales, and Account Management.

This is a customer-facing role.

We want to be explicit about this, because it is a real part of the job and not an occasional exception.

You will speak with customers and partners directly, and you will represent Finance in those conversations without a founder on the call. In practice, that means handling situations like a multi-store operator telling you their payout is wrong, or that a payment never arrived. You will need to be able to go into the underlying transaction data, figure out what actually happened, and explain it clearly and confidently to someone who is frustrated and whose money is involved.

You will also lead conversations about billing disputes, contract and revenue-share interpretation, overdue balances, and account suspension. Some of these are difficult conversations. We need someone who can hold them calmly, with the numbers in hand.

What you'll own

Billing, collections, and partner payouts - Own invoicing, collections, dunning, failed payments, and account suspension across subscriptions, revenue-share agreements, and project billing. - Own recurring revenue-share and partner payout processing, and resolve discrepancies end to end with customers, partners, and vendors. - Reconcile revenue and payouts across Stripe, ACH, Bill.com, partner reports, and internal systems. - Improve cash collection and give leadership a dependable view of AR.

Automation and systems building - Replace manual, error-prone finance workflows with systems you design and build — using SQL, Python, APIs, AI-enabled tooling, and automation platforms. - Build the exception logic that matters: workflows that flag overdue accounts, catch discrepancies early, and surface only what genuinely needs human judgment. - Create the documentation, controls, and data-quality standards that make complex pricing and partner arrangements repeatable rather than tribal knowledge.

Analysis and decision support - Pull data from multiple systems, clean it, and answer open-ended business questions with it. -Prepare the analysis behind partner negotiations, pricing and packaging decisions, and customer economics — bottom line first, methodology available. - Build and maintain dashboards for ARR, ARPU, ARPS, gross margin, collections, cash, burn, and runway.

Forecasting and reporting - Build and maintain forecasts across subscription, revenue-share, GMV-based, and project revenue, and model customer growth, launch timing, retention, ARPU, gross margin, cash, and runway. - Translate pipeline, contracted stores, live stores, and customer activity into revenue forecasts you can defend. - Compare forecast to actuals, investigate variances, and update assumptions as the business changes. - Prepare monthly leadership and board reporting materials, and support the outsourced accounting team through a timely monthly close

What we're looking for

• Roughly 3–6 years across strategic finance, FP&A, finance operations, revenue operations, business operations, or a closely related field.

• Working SQL. You can get to data yourself across multiple systems without waiting on anyone.

• Real automation experience. Some Python, comfort with APIs, and proficiency with Claude Code or similar AI development tooling. You have built things that removed work permanently, and you can point to them.

• Strong financial modeling in Excel or Google Sheets, including building models from scratch.

• Genuine comfort with messy source data — the ability to investigate inconsistencies and reach a well-supported answer rather than an approximate one.

• Startup experience, ideally Seed through Series B, in SaaS, marketplace, ecommerce, delivery, restaurant tech, logistics, or fintech.

• Strong ownership and urgency. You communicate early, meet commitments, and keep work moving without repeated follow-up.

• The ability to explain financial information clearly to people who don't work in finance — including customers.

• Helpful, not required: revenue-share, GMV, or multi-sided marketplace models; Stripe, Bill.com, QuickBooks, or NetSuite; BI tooling; US GAAP and SaaS revenue recognition

What success looks like

In your first few months, billing, collections, and partner payouts are accurate and consistent, and leadership has a reliable view of revenue, cash, runway, and unit economics.

By six months, a meaningful share of the manual work you inherited is running on systems you built, and discrepancies surface before anyone outside the company notices them.

Most importantly, you become the person who can take an ambiguous financial or operational question, find the right data, determine the answer, and build a repeatable process around it.

Why Lula

You will work directly with company leadership, with unusual visibility into how a multi-revenue-model business actually works, and with the freedom to rebuild how Finance and Business Operations function as we scale. If you like bringing order to complexity and building systems that make yesterday's problems disappear, we would like to hear from you.

We are remote-first. You will be asked to come to our Cherry Hill, NJ office occasionally — roughly once every few months.

Originally posted on Himalayas