Launch Budget Coordinator, STR Property Launches (Reconciliation Heavy, US Hours)

LAUNCH BUDGET COORDINATOR, SHORT-TERM RENTAL PROPERTY LAUNCHES
Remote. US business hours.

PLEASE READ THIS WHOLE POST BEFORE APPLYING. There are instructions at the bottom, and how you follow them is the first thing we look at.

ABOUT US

We run full-service, hands-off management for short-term rental owners across the US. Part of that is launching a property: an owner hands us an empty house and we furnish it, wire it, stock it, style it, photograph it and open it to guests. The owner pays one all-in launch budget for that. Furniture, tech, accessories, and the services that install them.

This seat owns the record of every dollar in that budget. It is reconciliation work: vendor invoices against what we committed to, card charges against the plan, receipts filed the day they exist, spreadsheets that have to tie. We automate everything software can do. What software cannot do is notice that a vendor invoice and a card statement disagree by $16.48, d ---------- that the $16.48 matters, and go find out why. Right now that work sits with our founder, and that is the whole reason this seat exists.

We are growing, this is the first seat of its kind here, and it will not be the last one.

WHAT THIS ROLE REALLY IS

Every case below is real. The amounts are changed, for the same reason we explain further down.

Nineteen furniture lines on a live property are flagged as ordered. There is no order number behind any of them, no charge on any card, and no confirmation from the vendor.

Either they were bought and nobody wrote it down, or somebody typed a word into the wrong cell. The difference is $4,318.62. If you place that order and it was already placed, the owner pays for the same furniture twice, and nobody finds out for a month.

That is the job.

Here is more of it, in the same week.

• Two lines carry the same item name and two different product links, so the house is getting either four sofas or two, a $2,144.75 question, and the owner is reading it as one line.
• A vendor invoice hit the card as $9,340.55 on one day and another $812.07 a week later, because that vendor captures payment as items ship. The record held only the first number, so the property looked $812.07 cheaper than it was.
• A tax column on a delivery showed $22.50 per mattress and nothing on the other sixty items. That is not tax. It is a state recycling fee that is legitimately owed, and two people here have already gotten it wrong.
• A four-figure order shipped to one property's address and belonged to a different property's plan. The ship-to address is never the answer. The item list is.
• One plan column read $10,462.31 against an order total of $10,462.08. A twenty-three cent gap between two numbers computed from completely different inputs made the row look reconciled while the real figure underneath it sat $1,384.90 low.

Every one of those is solvable. None of them is solvable by someone who is willing to let it go.

So the honest description of this role: it is detective work on money. Most days it is a spreadsheet, a vendor invoice, a receipt and a browser. It is quiet and it is deliberate. The person who is great at it is the person who genuinely cannot leave a number alone when it does not tie, who would rather spend forty minutes finding the missing $16.48 than type over the cell and move on, and who gets a small amount of satisfaction when the last line finally closes at zero.

Your job in one sentence: keep the record true enough that the close-out number is right the first time. By the time that number goes to an owner there is very little left for anyone to check, because you kept the record true for the three months leading up to it. We read it before it goes anywhere, and it goes out over our name, not yours.

This is not task-based VA work. Nobody is going to send you a list each morning telling you which rows to price or which invoice to open. You run a weekly rhythm and you can read your own dashboard, so you already know.

If that reads as tedious to you, we would genuinely rather you skip this one. If it reads as a puzzle, keep going.

WHAT YOU WILL OWN

Your instrument is one Google Sheet per property, our launch budget tracker. It is the single record of what the property is buying, what it committed to, what actually got charged, and what is left. Every property in flight has one and you run all of them.

You grow into this in two phases. Phase one is keeping the record true on properties that are already running. Phase two is owning a property's budget from the day the tracker opens to the day it closes.

PHASE ONE, KEEPING THE RECORD TRUE

• Price every row on the plan that has no price. Find the item, confirm the variant, the size and the pack quantity, and put a real number on it.
• Load the Amazon and Wayfair carts against the plan. This is more mechanical than it sounds and it has real traps. Our Amazon cart holds a hard 50 lines, and line 51 silently pushes the oldest line out into Saved for later, so a 152 row accessories list is four separate orders and you d ---------- the batches up front. Re-adding an item that is already in the cart raises its quantity instead of warning you. You verify by item code and quantity, never by the badge in the corner.
• Tag every order back onto the plan rows it paid for, so nothing is bought that the sheet does not know about.
• Log every card charge as its own row, with the invoice's true order total rather than the first posting that showed up, and file the receipt the day it exists. A charge with no receipt cannot be cleanly billed back, which means a missing receipt is money the company cannot recover that month.
• Reconcile every vendor invoice against what we actually committed to, line by line, and produce the defect list. What was charged, what was ordered, what is missing, what does not agree, and which of those is a real problem versus a coi ---------- .
• Run the flag pass every Friday. Filter the exception column and clear everything that is not clean. Some of our checks run from scripts on our side and we run them against your sheet, so your pass has to be clean before it reaches them.
• Chase our designer for the receipts, the property attributions and the open answers that nobody else is going to chase. The buying happens in person, in other states, on a company card, and store receipts print department codes instead of product names, so only the person who was standing there can say which room a $340 receipt belongs to. Nobody else will chase that, and after you start, nobody else has to. This is the one genuinely persistent, human thread in the job and it is a large part of its value.

PHASE TWO, OWNING THE BUDGET END TO END

• Open a tracker for a new property from our template and type the house into the quantity calculator: bedrooms, beds by size, baths, sleeps, TVs, floors. Half the quantities in the plan calculate themselves off those numbers, so this is not data entry, it is the foundation. Every count comes from a written source, and when two written sources disagree you flag it instead of picking a winner.
• Take the designer's spec in when it changes and surface what it moved: what got more expensive, what got cheaper, and which rows quietly disappeared. Never hand-merge two lists.
• Watch the envelope. The plan has a cap, and the week you first see that the plan is going to cross it, you say so out loud. Weeks early, not at the end. Warning early is the entire point of the number.
• Compute what owner money may be sent to pay down the company card, name the specific charges it covers, and evidence every one with a receipt. Then record the settlement against every row it paid. A row you forget to mark as settled asks for the same money again next month.
• Produce the close-out: the reconciliation that says whether the owner is owed a refund or owes a true-up, and the drafted invoice or refund figure behind it.

HELPING BUILD THE SYSTEM

• We have a written playbook for this seat and we are still finishing the SOPs behind it. You will help write them, in your own words, out of the work you actually did.
• Write down why a sheet looks the way it does, so the next person does not have to re-derive it. As we add properties this becomes more than one seat, and the person who runs it well is the person who trains the next one.

WHAT YOU WILL NOT DO, AND THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT SECTION IN THIS POST

You own the record. You never own the movement.

Nothing you do debits a bank, releases a wire, pays a card, or reaches an owner's inbox. Not once, not in an emergency, not on a deadline.

• You never fire a charge. Every single payment, card or eCheck or wire, is approved personally by our founder, on that specific charge, every time. There is no batch approval and there is no standing permission.
• You never move money out of any bank or merchant account. You compute what should be paid and you evidence it. He releases it.
• You do not place the orders. You build the cart, you verify it line by line, you hand it over with the batch, the total, the shipping address and the property reference it needs, and somebody else presses the button.
• You are not the property owner's contact. Not the approval schedule, not an invoice, not a refund figure, not an email with a number in it. You draft. We send. Always.
• You never add, edit or verify a vendor's bank details or payee information. Nobody in this seat does. That is the wall against invoice fraud, and urgency is the exact pretext it exists to defeat.
• You have no banking, no payment gateway and no accounting system access, on purpose. If you ever find that you somehow can reach one, you do not act, you report it.

Read that as protection, not as distrust. The seat that keeps the record of the money is deliberately not the seat that moves it, because a record that can move money is not a record, it is an opinion. That separation is what makes your close-out number worth something, and it means that when