Permanent - Cost Accountant - Ekurhuleni (East Rand) - South Africa

Job Description: Costing Accountant (Project & Operations Alignment)

Overview:

The Costing Accountant is a business-critical financial role physically and operationally embedded within the manufacturing and project management environment. Rather than sitting isolated in a corporate finance wing, this role is co-located with the Project Manager at the head office and production facility.

Reporting directly to the Finance Executive, this position serves as the real-time financial engine driving project execution, new product development (NPD), and plant optimizations. By sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with Project Management, the Costing Accountant ensures that engineering, toolroom, and manufacturing decisions are backed by rigorous data integrity, variance tracking, and margin protection from day one

2. Key Responsibilities & Duties:

1. Project Costing, Capital Expenditure (CapEx) & NPD Support:

• Real-Time Project Tracking: Partner with the Project Manager to track capital spend, tooling modifications, and product launches against budgeted projections.
• NPD Margin Modeling: Build financial cost models for new product developments from the initial design phase, ensuring raw material selection and manufacturing routings hit gross margin targets.
• CapEx Auditing: Prepare pre-project cost-benefit analyses (ROI, payback period) and conduct post-implementation reviews to verify if capital projects achieved expected efficiencies.

2. Standard Costing & Bill of Materials (BOM) Governance:

• BOM Engineering Collaboration: Work closely with the Project Manager, engineers, and plant teams to establish and audit accurate Bills of Materials (BOMs), machine cycle times, and labor routing rates.
• System Updates: Maintain, review, and adjust standard costing structures within the ERP system to mirror the physical shop-floor realities of new or optimized production lines.

3. Operational Variance Analysis & Material Tracking:

• Floor-Level Inefficiency Checks: Conduct weekly variance analyses (Material Usage Variance, Scrap/Waste allocations, and Labor Efficiency) directly on active project and manufacturing lines.
• Root-Cause Partnership: Identify cost leakages or unexpected baseline spikes alongside the Project Manager, providing actionable data to adjust technical parameters immediately.

4. Inventory, WIP & Commercial Alignment:

• Work-In-Progress (WIP) Tracking: Monitor and evaluate WIP valuations for active projects and production runs, ensuring proper valuation in line with IFRS.

Pricing Support:Provide simulated minimum floor-pricing and margin stress-tests to the Sales & Marketing team based on real-time project cost adjustments

3. KPIs and Performance Measurables

Performance will be evaluated quarterly against the following project-integrated metrics:

1. Project Budget Variance & CapEx Control:

• Metric: Deviation between approved project financial baselines and actual rollout costs.
• Target: Maintain project cost variances within +/- 2.5% of the original approved budget. Identify and flag potential cost overruns to the Project Manager before they impact project timelines.

2. BOM Integrity & First-Time Launch Accuracy:

• Metric: Percentage accuracy of BOM configurations for newly introduced or modified SKUs.
• Target: Achieve a 99% accuracy rate on initial production BOM configurations. Standard cost baselines for new lines must be verified, tested, and locked in the system prior to full-scale commercial manufacturing.

3. Joint Variance Response Time:

• Metric: Turnaround time for investigating manufacturing cost deviations.
• Target: Investigate any material waste or engineering routing variance exceeding 3% of standard cost, delivering a joint corrective action report with the Project Manager within 24 hours of detection.

4. Project Month-End Velocity & Reconciliation:

• Metric: Speed of project cost capitalization and inventory valuation closing.

Target: Reconcile all active project expenditure, tooling assets, and WIP inventory accounts by Day 3of the month-end close cycle

4. Skills & Qualifications:

• Education: Bachelor’s Degree in Accounting, Finance, or a related field. A specialized professional qualification such as CIMA (Chartered Institute of Management Accountants) or ACMA is highly preferred given the operational nature of this role.
• Experience: Minimum of 4 to 6 years of dedicated costing experience strictly within a manufacturing, heavy production, or FMCG environment. Specific experience tracking engineering projects, tooling costs, or new product rollouts is highly advantageous.
• Technical Proficiency: Expert-level mastery of Microsoft Excel (complex financial models, pivot tables, data lookups). Strong working knowledge of manufacturing ERP modules (such as Syspro, SAP, or Sage) focusing on Job Costing, BOM, and Inventory control.
• Collaboration Profile: Highly communicative and collaborative. Must thrive sitting in an operational/project-driven office environment rather than a traditional corporate accounting setup, seamlessly translating technical engineering parameters into clear financial metrics.