Cost Accountant

Overview

The Cost Accountant is going to supports the company’s operations by developing, analyzing, and maintaining cost and revenue models specific to steel production, processing, and sales. The candidate will work closely with Operations, Commercial, and Finance teams to ensure accurate costing, profitability analysis, inventory valuation, and financial reporting across the steel value chain.

• Develop and maintain standard costing models tailored to cold‑rolled steel production, including melt, hot band sourcing, cold reduction, annealing, slitting, and finishing processes.
• Analyze actual vs. standard production costs, providing insight into material yield losses, conversion costs, scrap recovery, and energy usage.
• Perform margin and revenue analysis across product grades, customer contracts, coil dimensions, and order mixes.
• Investigate and explain variance drivers, including coil purchase price fluctuations, conversion cost changes, line downtime, labor efficiency, freight, and overhead allocation.
• Support pricing and commercial teams with cost‑to‑serve analysis and product profitability reporting.
• Monitor steel coil and processed inventory movements to ensure accuracy across raw coils, WIP stages (pickling, cold reduction, annealing, tempering, slitting), and finished goods.
• Reconcile inventory accounts for raw steel, WIP, and finished goods with a focus on weight‑based accuracy, yield tracking, and scrap accounting.
• Assist in physical inventory counts and cycle counts, ensuring correct coil identification, tagging, and system accuracy.
• Prepare monthly journal entries related to cost allocations, scrap adjustments, inventory movements, and revenue recognition.
• Participate in month‑end and year‑end closing activities, ensuring accurate COGS, inventory valuation, and production reporting.
• Create dashboards and reports summarizing production costs, revenue trends, and operational KPIs for management.
• Support annual budgeting and rolling forecasts for production costs, inventory, scrap revenues, and plant conversion costs.
• Work with Operations, Commercial, and Supply Chain teams to model cost drivers such as throughput, yield, labor, energy consumption, maintenance, and coil acquisition costs.
• Maintain cost accounting modules within ERP/MRP and Net Suite systems (or relevant steel ERP platforms).
• Review and validate process routing accuracy for steel operations including reductions, anneal cycles, and finishing steps.
• Promote continuous improvement initiatives that enhance accuracy of costing, revenue insight, and operational efficiency.

Education:

• Bachelor’s Degree in Accounting, Finance, or related field required.

Experience:

• 3–7+ years of cost accounting experience in manufacturing.
• Experience with standard costing systems required.

• Experience in steel, metals production, or a heavy industrial environment strongly preferred.
• Ability to analyze large datasets including coil costs, yields, and production
• Strong financial analysis capabilities with attention to detail.

• Analytical and detail-oriented.
• Strong problem-solving skills.
• Effective cross-functional communication.
• Process improvement mindset.
• Manufacturing plant and office setting with regular interaction on the production floor.