Cost Accountant

Position Overview

The Cost Accountant is responsible for accurate cost, inventory, and gross margin analysis to support financial reporting, pricing discipline, and informed business decisions. This role maintains standard costs, reviews inventory valuation, analyzes landed cost and purchase price variances, and investigates margin performance by SKU, vendor, category, and channel. The Cost Accountant partners with operations, procurement, logistics, merchandising, and supply chain teams to identify cost drivers, explain margin movement, improve data accuracy, and support profitability improvement initiatives.

This is a hybrid role requiring on-site presence in our Manhattan office 3 to 4 days per week.

Essential Job Functions

• Prepare, review, and post daily, weekly, and monthly COGS, inventory, freight, duty, tariff, and landed cost journal entries.
• Reconcile inventory subledger activity to the general ledger, including inventory, freight-in, duty, tariff, capitalized freight, clearing, in-transit, and received-not-invoiced balances.
• Maintain and analyze standard costs, purchase cost changes, and vendor-level cost movements by SKU.
• Compare estimated landed cost to actual landed cost and investigate purchase price variance activity across systems.
• Analyze gross margin performance by SKU, vendor, product category, and channel, identifying the impact of cost changes, freight, duty, tariffs, markdowns, returns, damages, shrink, and inventory adjustments.
• Partner with merchandising, procurement, logistics, and operations to explain margin movement, validate cost assumptions, and support pricing, sourcing, and profitability decisions.
• Support SKU-level profitability reporting and highlight margin opportunities, cost leakage, incorrect freight coding, and other drivers of margin erosion.
• Review and post warehouse adjustments, cycle count variances, damages, disposals, returns, transfers, and write-offs.
• Support inventory reserve calculations and review inventory aging by SKU and location.
• Ensure month-end inventory cutoff accuracy and validate inventory movements across WMS, OMS, and ERP systems.
• Coordinate with cross-functional teams to prepare accurate in-transit inventory and capitalized freight entries.
• Partner with Logistics to monitor freight trends and assess their impact on product cost and gross margin.
• Prepare audit schedules and investigate unusual cost, margin, or inventory valuation issues.

You Have

• Bachelor’s degree in Accounting, Finance, Business, or a related field.
• [2–5] years of experience in cost accounting, inventory accounting, retail, distribution, e-commerce, manufacturing, or a related environment.
• Strong understanding of standard costing, landed cost, inventory valuation, variance analysis, cost-of-goods-sold accounting, and gross margin analysis.
• Ability to analyze gross margin drivers across product cost, freight, duty, tariffs, markdowns, returns, damages, shrink, and inventory adjustments.
• Knowledge of generally accepted accounting principles, financial controls, and month-end close procedures.
• Advanced Microsoft Excel skills, including pivot tables, lookups, formulas, data validation, and analysis of large datasets.
• Experience with ERP, WMS, OMS, or similar systems such as SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite, or comparable platforms.
• Strong analytical, problem-solving, and attention-to-detail skills.
• Ability to communicate cost and margin drivers clearly to finance and non-finance stakeholders.
• Ability to manage deadlines and work effectively across accounting, logistics, procurement, merchandising, operations, and supply chain teams.

Your Life and Career at RugsUSA

• A culture that promotes a healthy work/life balance 
• Benefits package offered to all eligible full-time employees (including medical, dental, vision, PTO, 401(k) 
• Exposure to career advancement opportunities across all departments 
• Generous employee discount that can be used across our house of brands!