Sr. Inventory Cost Accountant

HF Foods Group Inc•Powder Springs, GA

7d•Hybrid

About The Position

This role is based at the Company’s Powder Springs, Georgia facility and serves as the financial owner of that operation. It combines accounting responsibility for inventory and operations with an active cost stewardship mandate: reviewing the entire operating expense base of the warehouse, questioning spending directly with operations management, and identifying and eliminating inefficiency. The position is expected to be visible on the warehouse floor and in operating discussions, not confined to the monthly close process. It should be comfortable holding a position with facility leadership when the numbers do not support a decision, and equally comfortable being the person who explains why a cost moved. Beyond location-level ownership, the role contributes to the Company’s overall month-end close, preparing and reviewing journal entries, account reconciliations, and supporting schedules that feed consolidated reporting. As a public company, the Company requires the role to operate within a documented control environment and to support quarterly external reporting and audit. This is a hands-on individual contributor position with functional ownership rather than supervisory responsibility. Once established in the role, the position is expected to extend to the review of inventory and operations accounting at the Company’s two other east coast facilities.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in accounting or finance.
Four to seven years of progressive accounting experience, including substantive time in inventory or cost accounting within food distribution, wholesale distribution, manufacturing, retail, or third-party logistics.
Demonstrated hands-on ownership of duties.
Working command of US GAAP as applied to inventory (ASC 330) and vendor consideration (ASC 705-20).
Demonstrated experience owning an operating expense base and partnering with non-finance operators — plant, warehouse, distribution center, or site leadership — including a track record of identifying and delivering cost savings.
Advanced Excel, including work with large transactional data sets (pivot tables, lookups, and Power Query or equivalent).
Experience with a distribution ERP and warehouse management system and demonstrated ability to reconcile between operational and financial systems.
Ability to work onsite in Powder Springs, GA three days per week and to travel occasionally to Company facilities, including locations in North Carolina.

Nice To Haves

CPA or CMA.
Prior experience as a plant manager/senior, site manager/senior, distribution center manager/senior, or operations finance lead.
Public company experience with direct ownership of SOX 404 key controls.
Multi-site or multi-entity environment with intercompany activity.
Perishable, cold chain, protein, or center-of-plate product experience.
Data query and visualization capability (SQL, Power BI, or equivalent).
Professional working proficiency in Mandarin

Responsibilities

Own the perpetual-to-general-ledger inventory reconciliation for the Powder Springs facility; investigate, quantify, and resolve variances on a defined cadence.
Maintain the inventory valuation methodology, including capitalization of landed costs (freight-in, duty, customs, brokerage) and maintenance of standard or average cost.
Calculate and support reserves for shrink, spoilage, damage, short-dated product, and slow-moving or obsolete inventory; document methodology, assumptions, and period-over-period changes.
Review item master and cost file changes for accounting accuracy and maintain controls over cost change activity.
Own every category of warehouse and distribution operating expense, including warehouse and driver labor, overtime and temporary labor, fleet and fuel, third-party freight, refrigeration and utilities, occupancy and equipment leases, repairs and maintenance, sanitation, packaging and supplies, waste disposal, and safety and claims costs.
Review all facility spending on a recurring basis and question expenses directly with operations management — including approved and recurring spend that has not been revisited — rather than accepting prior-period run rates as a baseline.
Prepare and review facility-level accruals across all of the above categories and ensure period costs are recorded in the correct period.
Build and maintain unit-cost metrics that make inefficiency visible: cost per case, cost per delivery, cost per stop, labor hours per case, overtime as a percentage of total labor, fuel and miles per route, and energy cost per cubic foot of cold storage.
Investigate every material budget-to-actual and period-over-period variance to root cause with the responsible manager, and document both the driver and the agreed corrective action.
Identify, quantify, and track a pipeline of cost reduction and efficiency opportunities, reporting realized savings against identified opportunities.
Provide independent financial review of purchasing decisions, vendor and carrier arrangements, staffing plans, equipment purchases, and capital requests originating at the facility.
Produce gross margin analysis by product category and customer segment; identify, quantify, and escalate margin leakage.
Own the purchase-to-pay accounting interface: three-way match exceptions, receiving discrepancies, unvouchered receipts and received-not-invoiced accruals, and purchase price variance.
Lead a recurring operating review with facility leadership covering cost performance, variances, and open efficiency items.
Own inventory- and operations-related journal entries, account reconciliations, and fluctuation analysis within the monthly close calendar.
Contribute to the Company’s overall month-end close, including preparation and review of assigned journal entries, reconciliations, and supporting schedules outside the inventory cycle.
Execute and maintain SOX key controls over the inventory and procurement cycles; maintain current process documentation and remediate identified deficiencies.
Serve as the accounting contact for external audit testing of inventory, count observations, and vendor consideration.
Provide supporting schedules and analysis for quarterly and annual external reporting related to inventory and cost of sales.
Work directly with facility management, purchasing, and IT to resolve inventory and costing issues at the source rather than through period-end adjustment.
As scope expands, extend consistent inventory accounting practices to the Company’s North Carolina facilities and support review of their inventory and operations accounting.
Identify and implement automation and reporting improvements that reduce manual reconciliation effort.
Document procedures to a standard that allows the function to be reviewed, audited, and eventually shared as the team grows.