Financial Modelling Consultant - 3 month contract

Who is Bare

Bare is Australia's most highly rated end of life business - supporting Australian families through the hardest time in their life.

We are a company dedicated to providing accessible, affordable end-of-life care to change the way that Australians deal with death. Our aim is to change the game in the funeral industry which has long provided expensive, traditional, cookie cutter services that don't always meet the needs of the modern Australian.

By combining empathy with technology, we're creating end-of-life experiences that are simple, personalised and affordable. In only five years, we've served more than 50,000 families, have become Australia's most awarded end-of-life provider (with awards in customer service, innovation and digital disruption), and have built a team of more than 200 people committed to changing the way Australians deal with end-of-life. And we're just getting started.

Hear more about our story here!

The opportunity

Bare is an Australian funeral business that has grown quickly — new states, new facilities, new service lines, and a shift from using vendors to running more of the operation ourselves.

Our reporting was built for the business we were. We now want the financial infrastructure for the business we're becoming: a model that supports decisions about cost to serve, in-housing and where we put capital, at the level of granularity those decisions deserve.

This is a build project, and we want someone senior to own it end to end for three months.

What we want built

A financial reporting model, built from source data, where every assumption is visible and can be interrogated.

1. Rebuilding the general ledger from the ground up, invoice by invoice, assumption by assumption so that we have single source of truth we can trust

1. An explicit classification layer. Every dollar lands in a bucket by a rule someone can read, challenge and change. Where cost splits across functions, the basis is documented and traceable.

1. A single underlying data model — all of this culminates in a single model with payroll, supplier costs, revenue and entity allocations coming from one place rather than being assembled per report.

1. Unit cost to serve, by service type. This is the test of the work. If the output isn't a unit cost we can stand behind, we haven't got there.

1. Reproducibility. Run any month and get the same answer twice, with a visible reason when a number moves.

1. A documented method our team can run. When the engagement ends, the monthly cycle runs without you — our team working inside the structure and documentation you've built, with AI doing the heavy lifting. Design for that handover from the start.

Who we're looking for

This is the part that matters most to us. The scope above is achievable by a lot of people on paper; it's achievable in three months by a much smaller group.

Experience

You've built financial models or reporting infrastructure from primary data in a real operating business. That might have come from investment banking, transaction services, restructuring, analytical consulting, or a finance or strategy role inside a company that scaled fast. The badge matters less than the reps — we want someone who has done this more than once and knows where it goes wrong.

Exposure to multi-entity structures, related-party allocations, or operations with a meaningful labour component is a strong plus. Funeral industry experience is not required and is not something we're looking for.

Capability

• Commercial judgement, first and foremost. You can look at an operating business and see what actually drives its cost to serve — which numbers change a decision and which are noise. This is the thing we can least teach and most need.

• Strong financial modelling. You build models from primary data that hold together: allocations and splits handled sensibly, logic that survives someone pulling hard on it, and structure that someone else can pick up. Advanced spreadsheet craft is entirely fine — this doesn't have to become a database to be right.

• Data modelling from imperfect sources. Real businesses produce data that disagrees with itself. You need to be comfortable resolving that rather than waiting for a clean input.

• Genuinely fluent with AI, and fast because of it. We expect AI to be how you work — reading through invoice and payroll detail at volume, testing classifications, building and stress-testing the model, producing the documentation. Someone who uses it well will finish this in three months; someone who doesn't, won't. We'd like to see what you've built with it.

• Unit economics and cost-to-serve as a way of thinking, not a calculation you've run once.

You don't need to be an engineer. No SQL or Python required. If you have them, good — but we're hiring for commercial judgement and modelling ability multiplied by AI fluency, not for code.

How you work

• You go to the source. The instinct that makes someone good at this is opening the underlying document and checking what it actually says, rather than accepting the label on the summary. Most of the value in this project is in that instinct.

• You're self-directing. You'll get a daily hour with the VP of Operations to clear questions, and otherwise you're expected to find your own way to the answer.

• You can explain a number to an operator. Much of what you build will be used by people without a finance background, to make decisions. If they can't follow it, it doesn't work.

• You build for handover from day one. The measure of success is that we're running it after you leave.

• You're comfortable being the one who does the work. Small team, no analysts under you, no workstream to coordinate. Very hands-on.

Probably not the right fit if

Your strength is running a programme, managing stakeholders and reporting on progress. Those are real skills and we have people who cover them. This role is for someone who wants to be elbow-deep in the details personally, and who'd find that the interesting part rather than the tedious part.

What you'll have to work with

Full access to our source financial and operational data — payroll, supplier and customer invoicing, revenue by service line, entity-level reporting and several years of history. You'll also have direct access to the finance team who built the current reporting, and to the operators who know how the business actually runs day to day.

Plus roughly an hour every morning with our VP of Operations to work through the previous day's questions. That's a deliberate commitment. The fastest route through a business with this much operational nuance is a short daily loop with someone who can explain why things are the way they are.

How we'll judge it

At the end of three months:

• We can defend a unit cost to serve, by service type, line by line

• Any figure in the monthly pack traces back to source quickly, without asking you

• Two people running the same month independently get the same answer

• Our team is running the monthly cycle, not you

• We have an honest map of which assumptions are still soft — that's worth more to us than false precision

How it fits what comes next

This work sits upstream of our data warehouse programme. We want the underlying model right before we industrialise it, so sequencing matters.

What's in it for me?

Someone in our end-of-life team recently described their role this way: "This is the most impactful work I've ever done. I feel lucky to be able to help people that truly need support." So, there's that. We've also been named one of the 2026 Top 10 Inspiring Workplaces across Australasia — proof that our people-first culture is more than just talk. #PeopleFirst

In addition, we offer:

• Great opportunities for personal growth, promotion, and career development
• Work-from-home flexibility — with plenty of autonomy and trust
• A friendly, fun, and supportive environment — people genuinely love what they do at Bare
• Competitive remuneration package
• The chance to make an impact at one of the most critical moments in someone's life

The main reason you'll join, though, is because you believe in what we do and are excited to truly transform an industry.

Sound like you? Apply now with your CV and a cover letter telling us why you want to be part of Bare.