Management Accountant

• Management Accountant
• Wave Group City of London, Hybrid Competitive Basic Salary + Bonus
• Reports to: Finance Director.
• Works closely with: Client Operations Manager on delivery and contractor operations
• About Wave Group
• Wave Global Group is a tech-enabled professional services business with two service engines and a product arm that incubates and owns its software and data assets.
• Services, software, and data compounding together.

Wave Talent. UK recruitment and staffing. Permanent and contract technology and digital professionals for VC-backed and enterprise clients. The original and largest revenue engine.

WaveWorks. SoW-based enterprise consultancy. Multi-workstream technology programmes at seven-figure scale. The growth engine shifting Wave's revenue mix from services to programmes.

Wave Labs. The group's product and technology arm. Labs incubated and owns the group's two proprietary assets:

WaveMind. Self-serve AI hiring platform, built on Wave Talent's proprietary candidate universe. A quality-controlled alternative to pure AI hiring tools. The ARR engine.

Mothership. Internal data lake with LLM copilot capability. Powers Iron Man Suits, candidate matching, financial reporting, and group intelligence. The infrastructure that compounds every year the group exists.

Wave is scaling across the UK, US, and UAE and building toward a meaningful exit. Every role is designed to compound against that trajectory.

The role in one paragraphTo be considered for this role you must have experience within an in-house finance position within either a recruitment agency, a consultancy, or in-house within a sales focused high growth start up.

The person who owns Wave's management accounting and finance function day to day. You own the month-end close and the monthly management accounts, alongside running finance operations, contractor payroll and compliance across the group, and you keep the books clean, current and ready for scrutiny.

This is a mid-level, hands-on role for a full or part-qualified ACCA accountant who wants real ownership, not a support seat. The management accounting is the core of the job, and the scope deepens as we hire a dedicated contracts and compliance person beneath you over time. A clear path toward Finance Manager as the group scales.

Claude, Wave Chat and Mothership are primary working tools: AI does the production, you do the judgement.

What you own and what success looks like:

Management accounts, reporting and revenue assuranceProduce the monthly management accounts pack and reconcile revenue across Talent, WaveWorks and WaveMind to source systems.

Accounting and month-endOwn reconciliations, journals, ledger hygiene and the month-end close. Hand the Finance Director clean numbers to analyse, not assemble.

Finance operationsOwn the AR function end to end: invoicing, a tiered chaser sequence on cadence, and Dext expenses. Own the escalation judgement when clients go overdue.

Contractor payrollOwn the payroll cycle: timesheet coordination, approvals, and accurate inputs every cycle, so contractors are paid correctly and on time.

Compliance and controlsOwn the compliance calendar, VAT prep and contractor compliance, plus UAE and US finance compliance as those entities come online. A dedicated contracts and compliance hire will sit beneath you as we grow.

Systems, AI and integrationMaintain the finance AI workflows, drive Mothership adoption, and own finance-side data integrity on the Xero to Mothership integration.

Who we are looking for

• Full or part-qualified ACCA (or ACA/CIMA); genuinely strong on management accounting, not just finance admin
• Mid-level finance and accounting experience, ideally professional services or tech; owns month-end, management accounts and reconciliations independently
• Proficient with Xero or equivalent, with high standards for accuracy and follow-through
• Confident owning a finance function day to day, and being the person others rely on to get it right
• Strong on compliance and controls, with the discipline to stay ahead of deadlines
• Tech and AI obsessed;
• Claude, Wave Chat and Mothership are how this role operates
• Clear, professional communicator, written and verbal, much of it external-facing
• Proactive and self-sufficient across management accounting, payroll and compliance
• Ambitious; wants to grow into a Finance Manager seat as Wave scales
• Why work at Wave
• Shoreditch HQ with hybrid working (3 days in)30+ days annual leave including birthday off and Christmas closure
• Private healthcare with AXAEnhanced parental leave (6 weeks full pay for both parents)
• Performance-related bonus
• Annual company trips for high achievers (past trips: Mexico, Vegas, Mykonos, Dubai)
• Apple equipment
• EMI share options tied to group growth