Senior Fund Accountant

Reports to: Fund Controller | Location: West Palm Beach, FL

About the Company

Sterling Organization is a vertically integrated private equity real estate firm whose national platform is focused on investing in retail and distribution real estate assets across the risk spectrum in major markets within the United States. Sterling Organization, with offices across the nation, is headquartered in West Palm Beach, FL.

About the Role

The Fund Accounting team is intentionally lean. Our goal is to use technology and AI for repetitive work, and people for the work that actually requires judgment — and we're looking for someone to help us get there. That makes this a different kind of role. We expect strong fund accounting fundamentals — fund close, consolidation, waterfalls, capital activity, investor reporting — and we expect you to be genuinely fluent with the tools that take manual work off your plate. Technology fluency is a core requirement, not a bonus. We need someone who treats technology as part of the job, not a separate skill set.

Fund Accounting Responsibilities

• Financial statements. 

• • Maintain the general ledger for multiple fund entities, including preparation of journal entries.
  • Review daily bank activity and record transactions.
  • Monitor cash balances and prepare weekly and monthly bank statement reconciliations.
  • Prepare monthly and quarterly fund-level financial statements under US GAAP (ASC 946) along with supporting schedules and workpapers.

• Capital activity. Prepare capital call and distribution calculations; allocate amounts across LPs, parallel vehicles, feeders, and co-invest sleeves; produce capital account statements. 
• Waterfalls and allocations. Calculate preferred return, GP catch-up, and carried interest waterfalls. Reconcile to fund documents. Be able to defend every number.
• Joint ventures. Maintain JV accounting, including partner capital tracking, distributions under the JV agreement, and reconciliation to JV partner reporting.
• REIT compliance. Support quarterly REIT income and asset testing for fund vehicles structured as REITs; coordinate with tax preparers on test results.
• Reporting. Prepare audit workpapers; own assigned PBC sections and respond directly to auditors (and tax preparers). Prepare components of the quarterly investor reporting package and respond to LP information requests, including investor DDQs. Work with the investor relations team to maintain and post capital account statements, K-1s, and quarterly packages on schedule. Prepare track record. Prepare loan compliance calculations and lender package.
• Line of credit and fund-level debt. Track LOC balances, draws, and paydowns; prepare cash forecasts against the facility; monitor covenant compliance and prepare lender reporting.
• Ad hoc analysis. Support the team on special projects — fund formation, side-letter analysis, deal-level modeling, and other one-off work that comes with a lean team.
• Build and maintain the workflows that do the work. Design and maintain the Excel / Power Query workpapers, reconciliation models, and data pulls that handle recurring close tasks. The goal is workpapers that largely refresh themselves and require human judgment only where judgment is actually needed.
• Yardi. Own the data flow from property-level books into fund-level workpapers. Identify and eliminate manual exports, manual mappings, and copy-paste between systems.
• AI-assisted review and document extraction. Use AI tools to extract data from JV agreements, fund documents, loan documents, among others, to tie out reporting packages and to surface anomalies in workpapers. You will not just use these tools — you will help decide where they belong in our process.
• Eliminate recurring manual work. When you find yourself doing something repetitive, your default response is to ask whether it should be automated. Each quarter you are expected to bring forward at least one meaningful automation or process improvement and see it through implementation.
• Document and share. Workpapers, models, and automations need to be auditable and maintainable by someone other than you. Build them that way from the start.

What we are looking for

Required:

• Bachelor’s degree in accounting.
• 4+ years of accounting experience, including meaningful time in fund accounting at a private equity real estate firm, a real estate fund administrator, or auditing real estate funds at a public accounting firm.
• Working knowledge of US GAAP for investment companies (ASC 946), fair value measurement, and real estate-specific accounting.
• Hands-on experience preparing fund-level workpapers and financial statements, capital calls and distributions, and waterfall calculations.
• Embraces AI tools and emerging technologies thoughtfully, with an eye toward improving accuracy, speed, and insight.
• A demonstrated track record of replacing manual work with tooling.
• Genuine Excel fluency, including Power Query. We care less about how clever your formulas are and more about whether someone else can pick up your file and trust it.
• Clear written communication. 
• A service mindset toward internal and external clients. The deal team, asset managers, auditors, tax preparers, and LPs all rely on what you produce; you treat the quality and timeliness of what leaves your desk as part of the job, not a courtesy.
• Organized under pressure. You run multiple workstreams against fixed close and reporting deadlines without dropping detail; when priorities shift mid-quarter, you re-sequence the work rather than letting things slip.

Strongly preferred:

• CPA or active candidate.
• Hands-on experience with AI tools applied to accounting or audit work — document extraction, reconciliation tooling, AI-assisted review platforms — or comparable scripting / data work (Power Automate, Alteryx, Python, SQL).
• Exposure to joint venture accounting and multi-tier fund structures (parallel vehicles, feeders, co-invest).
• Hands-on experience with Yardi.

Sterling Organization is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, ethnicity, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, or any other characteristic protected by law.