Office Manager

Position	Office Manager
Company	Valley Fire Control, LLC
Location	1210 Jackson St SE, Ste A & B, Albany, OR 97322 — on site, in office
Reports To	General Manager, Albany and Newport (direct). Functional (indirect) reporting to the Controller, Columbia Safety Services (hold-co parent).
Supervises	One administrative employee
Employment Type	Full-time, hourly, non-exempt — eligible for overtime
Experience Level	Experienced — this is not an entry-level or trainee seat
Compensation	$30.00 – $35.00 per hour, paid weekly
Incentive Eligibility	Annual bonus opportunity, $5,000 target, tied to management objectives. Not eligible for the remainder of 2026.
Travel	Minimal. Two to four trips per year to our Seattle office for training, with travel expenses paid by the company.
Remote Eligibility	None. This position is on site in Albany, Oregon.

Valley Fire Control, LLC has protected buildings and the people in them for decades. We install, inspect, test, and service fire and life safety systems — portable fire extinguishers, kitchen and industrial suppression, clean agent and special hazard systems, vehicle suppression, fire sprinklers, and fire alarm. Valley Fire Control is where the extinguisher and suppression trade is taught inside our group, and our technicians are trained here rather than hired ready-made.

We are part of Columbia Safety Services, LLC, a multi-state regional fire and life safety company:

• Columbia Fire, LLC — Seattle, WA
• Valley Fire Control, LLC — Albany and Newport, OR + Spokane, WA (with an office in St Maries, ID)
• FFF Protection — Greater Boise, with an office in Nampa, ID

Each operating company is its own legal entity. This position is employed by Valley Fire Control, LLC. Columbia Fire, LLC is a sister company under common ownership — a separate legal entity, not the same business. FFF Protection is a trade name of Valley Fire Control, LLC.

Our core values guide how we operate: Customer First, Grit, Effective Communication, Own the Outcome, Take Pride in the Work, and Do the Right Thing.

Albany and Newport have grown faster than the administrative structure behind them. Today the General Manager picks up billing questions, collection calls, timecard corrections, and new-hire paperwork on top of running the business. None of that work is beneath anyone here — it simply needs an owner, so it gets done well and on time instead of squeezed between everything else. At the same time, the corporate accounting team reaches across a state line to chase job setup, invoicing, and time entry that is better sorted out at the source, by someone who can walk down the hall and ask.

Neither arrangement holds as we grow. This seat puts an owner in the building. You run the behind-the-scenes of the office: you close the loop on billing and collections locally, and you keep our systems clean enough that corporate accounting can rely on what comes out of them without re-checking it.

You are two things at once: the right-hand business partner to the General Manager, and the local extension of the corporate accounting team. Both halves are real.

Run the Albany office

• Be accountable for the day-to-day operation of the Albany office — phone coverage, mail, supplies, vendor accounts, office equipment, and the general condition and order of the workplace. Accountable does not mean you personally do all of it. You have an administrative professional on the team who already knows our customers and our work and who is looking forward to having a leader in this seat. Much of this runs through that role. Some days it runs through you, and you pick up the phone without being asked.
• Supervise that administrative employee well. Set priorities, make it clear what they own, review work, coach, and handle the routine performance conversations that go with directing someone’s work.
• Act as the administrative point of contact for field technicians, customers, and vendors dealing with the Albany office.
• Decide how local administrative work gets done, within company standards — build the routines, checklists, and calendars that make the office run the same way every week whether or not you are in the building. Software, safety, and HR policy are set at the parent-company level. How this office runs day to day, and what it feels like to work here, is yours to shape.

Set the tone and build the relationships

This is a real part of the job, not a soft extra. The Albany culture is already good. Your job is to add to it and to protect it.

• Set the tone at the front of the office. You are often the first voice a customer hears and the first face a technician sees coming in off a route. Steady, warm, and unflappable is the standard, including on the days when the schedule falls apart.
• Build real working relationships with the field. Technicians should want to bring you a problem early rather than hide it until Friday. That trust is what makes the time, job costing, and billing work actually function.
• Build relationships beyond Albany. Newport is a satellite location, which operates under Albany’s supervision, and Spokane and Boise are part of the same group. Know your counterparts, trade what works, and pick up the phone rather than waiting to be introduced.
• Be a genuine partner to the parent-company accounting and HR teams. They are not a head office that sends demands. They are teammates you will rely on, and who will rely on you.
• Bring a positive, constructive presence to change. When something new lands — a process, a system, a policy — how you carry it largely determines whether the office adopts it or resists it.

Project setup, billing, and collections

• Set up jobs and projects in Acumatica, including the coding that makes cost and revenue land where they belong.
• Produce and issue customer invoices — progress billings, time-and-material billings, and service invoices — on a schedule, not when someone asks.
• Own accounts receivable for the location: track aging, make collection calls, resolve disputes, apply and deposit payments, and escalate the accounts that need a General Manager or Controller.
• Manage service order workflow in ServiceTrade — scheduling and dispatch support, quoting, invoicing, and closing out work orders so nothing sits completed and unbilled. ServiceTrade is what we run today. We expect to move to Ember, and you would be part of making that change land well in Albany.

Payroll, time, and HR administration

• Review every local employee’s time weekly for accurate hours and job costing, and sort out the entries that are wrong before they reach payroll. This is the single highest-leverage recurring task in the job.
• Drive job costing of field hours from where it is today to where it needs to be. Charging hours to jobs is a new process for the field this year, and roughly a fifth of field hours currently carry job costing against a target of nearly all of them. Closing that gap is not a matter of chasing people. It is supporting technicians through a change that is still new to them — showing them what good looks like, making it easy, and following up without making anyone feel policed.
• Administer WorkforceGo for the location: new-hire onboarding, employee data changes, benefits enrollment support, and payroll assistance in coordination with corporate HR and accounting.
• Support the new-hire experience end to end — paperwork complete and correct on day one, equipment and access ready, and the person actually oriented rather than handed a folder.

CRM and sales support

• HubSpot is a small part of the business today. The General Manager carries most of the selling and most of the CRM activity that goes with it. Your job is to keep that data clean, current, and actually useful — contacts, companies, deals, and activity — so it informs decisions instead of sitting there.
• Over time we expect to bring a couple of technicians into seller-doer roles as the business is ready for it. When that happens, the administrative weight of the CRM sits largely with you and your teammate, not with the technicians. Plan on growing into that rather than inheriting it on day one.
• Produce the local reporting the General Manager needs out of HubSpot and Acumatica — built once and repeatable, or generated with the AI tools available to you — rather than rebuilt by hand every month. You will not arrive knowing our systems, but you do need the technical curiosity to learn them and to figure out how to make the tools do the work.

Shared accounting support (functional reporting to the Controller)

Once your primary Albany responsibilities are current, your remaining capacity supports the corporate accounting team across Valley Fire Control — Albany, Newport, Spokane, Boise, and locations we open later. How much of this you take on depends on how efficiently you run the first four sections above. Work in this category may include:

• Bank reconciliations
• Accounts payable — coding, entry, and vendor resolution
• Accounts receivable across locations — billing, collections, and deposits
• Journal entries and account reconciliations
• Payroll assistance across locations
• Certified payroll filings on prevailing wage projects. You do not need to arrive knowing how to do this — we will train you.
• Schedules, support, and requested documentation during month-end and year-end close and reviews

Systems and improvement

• Be the local expert on our systems — Acumatica, ServiceTrade, HubSpot, and WorkforceGo, plus Ember if and when we move to it — and the person others come to when something does not work the way they expect.
• Use AI tools in your actual workflow, beyond asking a chatbot questions: build repeatable prompts, structured projects, and workflows that other people in the office can run without you sitting next to them.
• Find the manual, duplicated, and paper-based steps in our local processes and remove them. Bring the change to the General Manager and the Controller with a recommendation, then lead it.

• You are accurate. You reconcile, you tie things out, and you notice when a number does not look right.
• You bring energy to the office and people are glad you are there. The tone at the front of the building is better because of you, and it holds up on hard days. This is not decoration — it is one of the outcomes this job is measured on.
• You build relationships on purpose, not by accident. You learn names, you follow up, and you are as easy to work with for a technician in the shop as for an accountant two states away.
• You lead change rather than absorb it. When you find a better way, you make the case, get agreement, and then carry it through the awkward middle part where people have to learn something new.
• You are genuinely capable with computers. You learn new software quickly, you troubleshoot before escalating, and you can explain a system to someone who does not want to learn it.
• You keep confidences. You will handle payroll, compensation, and employee information, and you will be trusted with information the rest of the office does not have.
• You will pick up the phone. Collections, a vendor dispute, a customer who is unhappy about an invoice — you call rather than send a third email.
• You are comfortable being the only person in your seat. There is no one in Albany doing this job alongside you.

We would rather you rule yourself out now than in month three.

• If you need to inherit a finished, well-documented process, this will not go well. Our systems exist and they work, but process ownership and task-level training are still being built. You are here to build some of it.
• If you have spent your whole career inside a large company with a training department, a help desk, a shared services center, and a written playbook for everything, the step down in scaffolding is real. Some people find that liberating. Some find it exhausting. Be honest with yourself about which one you are.
• If you want to stay behind a screen, this is the wrong seat. A meaningful part of the job is walking out to the shop to ask a technician why their hours are coded the way they are.
• If "that is not my job" is a sentence you use, you will be unhappy. The scope here is wide on purpose and it moves with what the location needs.
• If you want to be strictly an accountant, we would rather you apply to a corporate accounting seat. This job is roughly half office leadership and half accounting execution, and the office half does not get to be the part you skip.
• If supervising someone — giving direction, correcting work, having an uncomfortable conversation — is something you would rather avoid, this role includes it from day one.

• Associate degree in accounting, business administration, finance, human resources, or a closely related field.
• Two or more years in an office manager, business manager, office administrator, bookkeeper, or accounting specialist role.
• Hands-on experience across the transaction cycle: accounts payable, accounts receivable and customer billing, collections, deposits, and bank reconciliation.
• Experience preparing or posting journal entries.
• Experience with an ERP or full accounting system — for example Acumatica, Sage, Viewpoint/Vista, NetSuite, or QuickBooks Enterprise — and demonstrated ability to learn a new one quickly.
• Payroll support experience, including reviewing timecards and correcting hours and cost coding before payroll processing.
• Advanced Excel — pivot tables, lookups, and reconciling large exports.
• Experience directing the work of at least one employee, or a specific and credible example of readiness to do so.
• Practical experience using AI tools in day-to-day work, beyond casual chatbot questions. Be ready to show what you have built and how it is used.
• Valid driver’s license and an insurable driving record.
• Legally authorized to work in the United States.

• Bachelor’s degree in accounting, business administration, finance, human resources, or a related field.
• Construction, specialty contracting, or field-service industry experience — job costing, work-in-process, progress billing, retainage, and lien waivers.
• Direct experience with Acumatica, ServiceTrade, Ember, HubSpot, or WorkforceGo.
• Experience supporting more than one location or legal entity.
• Experience in a company that was actively changing its systems or processes, rather than one running steady state.

$30.00 – $35.00 per hour. This position is hourly and non-exempt. You are paid for every hour you work, on a weekly payroll cycle, and hours worked over 40 in a workweek are paid at the overtime rate.

Placement within the range depends on demonstrated accounting depth, systems capability, and supervisory experience. This is a good-faith range, not a target or a ceiling on the role over time.

Annual bonus

This position participates in an annual bonus with a target of $5,000. The bonus is measured against management objectives set collaboratively by the Controller and the General Manager, weighted 50% to company performance and 50% to individual goals. Bonus awards depend on performance and are not guaranteed.

The remainder of the 2026 calendar year is treated as an onboarding period and is not bonus eligible. Bonus participation begins with the 2027 plan year.