Cost Acountant

About the role

Brix produces beverages and runs contract packing alongside its own brands. The business needs to know, accurately and quickly, what each product, batch and customer costs and earns. This is where the Cost Accountant comes in.

This role owns product costing, inventory valuation, manufacturing variance analysis and margin reporting, and turns that into advice Production, Supply Chain and Sales can act on. It is a qualified, standalone specialist role working directly with operational leaders.

The focus is control and improvement: accurate contract packing billing, credit control, collections and automating the transactional work, rather than processing it by hand.

Key responsibilities

• Cost new products, runs and contract packing quotes before they are committed, and review actual against quoted margin afterwards.
• Help manage inventory valuation, WIP and cost of goods sold, stock counts, provisioning and obsolescence reviews.
• Maintain costing and inventory master data in the ERP, working with Supply Chain on data integrity.
• Analyse actual production costs against standard, identifying and explaining material, labour, packaging, overhead, yield and wastage variances.
• Report margin by product, batch, customer and channel, including contract packing customer profitability.
• Work with the Head of Supply Chain and Production to quantify the cost of wastage, downtime and inefficiency, and to identify and track cost savings.
• Lead the costing, inventory and gross margin components of the annual budget and rolling forecasts.
• Prepare the monthly costing, inventory and margin reporting pack, with commentary that explains what changed and why.
• Strengthen costing, inventory and receivables controls.
• Support month-end, year-end and external audit for costing, inventory and receivables balances.

About you

• At least three years' accounting experience, including at least 18 months in product or manufacturing costing in a food, beverage or FMCG manufacturing environment.
• Hands-on experience with standard costing, bills of material, manufacturing variance analysis and inventory valuation.
• Intermediate Excel and the ability to build cost and margin models.
• Able to explain costing and margin findings clearly to non-finance managers and challenge operational assumptions constructively.
• Preferred experience working in an ERP or MRP environment.
• Three or more years' accounting experience, including one or more years in manufacturing costing.
• Beverage, wine or brewing costing experience.
• Contract packing or co-manufacturing costing and customer profitability experience.
• NetSuite experience.
• CA or CPA preferred but not essential.

About us

Brix produces beverages and runs contract packing alongside its own brands.