Take restaurants live.

The company

Meet Garde

Garde is the financial backbone for independent restaurants: accounting and bookkeeping, with a full software suite for inventory, payroll, scheduling and reporting, all in one place.

We gather and centralise a restaurant's data, clean it up and build their financials, analyse those financials to uncover opportunities, then give them the workflows and software to act on it.

Restaurants sign with us and expect a clean first P&L inside 45 days, then an on-time close every month after. Our top service tier is the one where an owner stops asking what happened and starts asking what should I do. You are the person who answers that question, for a book of them at once.

What you'll do

• Own the monthly advisory cycle. Every client gets a close, then a conversation. You read what the close is telling you, write the brief, and get on the call. Most owners have never had numbers they could trust, let alone someone to argue with about them.
• Run prime cost like it is the whole job, because it mostly is. COGS plus labour as one managed number. You know the benchmarks cold — food 28 to 35 per cent, beverage 18 to 24, labour 25 to 35, prime under 60 to 65 per cent of sales — and you know which lever moves first when a location drifts.
• Build and defend the forecast. A weekly cash position and a 13-week forecast per client, drafted by our AI teammates and owned by you. You set payment timing against it and flag the shortfall weeks before the owner would feel it.
• Do the work that earns the tier. Menu and item-level margin analysis, labour modelling against the schedule, new-location pro formas, lease and percentage-rent decisions, buy-versus-lease on equipment, and the go or no-go on a second site.
• Sit in the hard conversations. Lender covenant discussions, landlord renegotiations, vendor terms. This is the line between a real CFO relationship and outsourced bookkeeping with a dashboard, and it is the reason the tier exists.
• Consolidate multi-entity groups. Intercompany eliminations, cost allocation across brands and units by something defensible rather than an equal split, and location-level P&Ls that stop a profitable unit from masking a failing one.
• Work the 13-period calendar. Most restaurants run 13 four-week periods, not 12 months. It changes close cadence, period comparisons and often filing frequency. Generalist accountants do not know it exists.
• Set the standard for the team below you. You review what the bookkeepers and accountants hand up, and you send it back when it is not right. Nothing reaches a client over your name that you would not defend.
• Use the agents. Our AI teammates draft the close brief, the cash position and the audits. You are the judgement on top, not the typist underneath.

Who fits this role

• Five or more years in accounting or finance, with at least two carrying full responsibility for a set of books end to end.
• CPA, the equivalent qualification in your own country, or a controller track record that makes the letters beside the point.
• Fluent US GAAP. You are producing statements a US lender and a US tax preparer will both read.
• Genuinely client-facing English. You will spend hours on video with American restaurant owners, and sometimes in a disagreement with one. This is the hardest thing to verify remotely and the thing we screen hardest on.
• Restaurant, hospitality or multi-unit retail P&L experience. If you have never seen a prime cost line, this is not the role.
• Comfortable being the only finance person in the room, and comfortable saying the unwelcome thing before the decision rather than after it.
• Able to overlap meaningfully with New York hours.

Nice to have

• Restaurant365, MarginEdge, Compeat or Plate IQ.
• Prior work at an outsourced-accounting or fractional-CFO practice, carrying several clients at once.
• ASC 842 lease accounting, percentage rent and CAM.
• Multi-state US sales tax.
• Spanish and English both strong.

How we work together

• Start with the operator. Every decision starts with the restaurant owner on the other end. We speak kitchen language, not accounting jargon, and we do not trade what an operator needs for what is convenient for us.
• Accuracy is the job. Clients make real money decisions on the numbers we hand them. No plug accounts, and audit before you publish. Get it right, then make it fast.
• Get leverage. AI is a teammate, not a demo. We work with agents every day: the operator approves, the agents do the work, and we fix the root cause rather than the symptom. You do not need to code. You need to be curious.
• Own it end to end. You run your work from start to finished. If something is not done it is yours: you are the person who cleans it, not the one who complains about it. Say it early when something is slipping. No surprises, no quiet failures.
• Be frank. Say the hard thing to anyone, at any level, before the decision, then commit fully once it is made. Success is never quiet, and neither are problems. Frank is not unkind.
• Move, then learn. We would rather ship something small this week and be wrong about part of it than plan for a month and be certain. Do it, then learn.

How we hire

1. A five-minute application, then a two-minute Loom: who you are, one messy data problem you cleaned up, and why Garde. Applications without a Loom are not considered.
2. A screening call.
3. A final call with the founder.
4. An offer.

Apply

Application

The application, then a two-minute Loom.