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Top-rated Bookkeeper Certified Accountant (ACCA-UK) | Expert Bookkeeper & Financial Reporting Specialist | Ex-EY I'm Muhammad Raza Zaidi, a Certified Chartered Accountant and ACCA-UK member with over a decade of accounting, bookkeeping, audit, and financial reporting experience across Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. I don't just enter transactions, I bring Big Four-trained precision and CFO-level financial judgment to every set of books I touch. My career started in the Audit & Assurance division of EY Ford Rhodes (Pakistan), a member firm of Ernst & Young, where I was trained rigorously in International Standards on Auditing (ISA) across statutory audits, group audits, and Agreed-Upon Procedures engagements. An international secondment with EY Middle East (Doha & Dubai) further sharpened my expertise in GCC regulatory frameworks and multinational client management. I later moved into industry, spending seven years in senior finance leadership roles including three years in Luxembourg, a global hub for private equity and real estate fund structuring. There, I held end-to-end ownership of accounting, finance and controllership functions, working directly with senior management and boards on complex reporting cycles, statutory compliance, budgeting, forecasting, and liquidity planning. I also directly managed offshore, outsourced bookkeeping teams and replicated the same model to my clients on Upwork. Today, I lead MRZ Consultants, a multidisciplinary accounting and advisory firm, and bring that same infrastructure, quality control, and Big Four discipline to every Upwork client whether you need a one-time cleanup or a long-term outsourced bookkeeping partner. Accountant | Private Equity & Fund Bookkeeping | ACCA-UK 🔹 Credentials & Trust Signals ✅ Certified Accountant ✅ ACCA-UK Member (Association of Chartered Certified Accountants) ✅ Trained at EY (Ernst & Young) one of the Big Four assurance firms ✅ 10+ years international experience: Pakistan, Qatar, UAE, Luxembourg ✅ CEO of MRZ Consultants, an accounting & advisory firm with a full team of Accountants, Fractional Controllers, and Corporate Specialists. 🔹 What I Bring to Your Business ✅ Full-cycle bookkeeping from source documents to finished financial statements ✅ Bookkeeping cleanup and catch-up for books that are months or years behind ✅ Chart of Accounts design and restructuring ✅ Bank, credit card, and intercompany reconciliation ✅ Accounts Payable (AP) bill entry, vendor management, payment scheduling ✅ Accounts Receivable (AR) invoicing, collections, aging analysis ✅ Multi-entity, multi-currency, multi-jurisdiction bookkeeping ✅ Month-end and year-end close ✅ General ledger maintenance and journal entry review ✅ Payroll processing oversight and compliance support ✅ Financial statement preparation P&L, Balance Sheet, Cash Flow ✅ CT-600 UK return ✅ Financial reporting under IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) ✅ Statutory compliance and regulatory filings across multiple jurisdictions ✅ Fair value measurement, consolidation accounting, and equity method accounting for investment funds and holding structures ✅ Offshore/outsourced bookkeeping team leadership and quality control 🔹 Industries I Specialize In Private Equity & Real Estate Funds • Power & Utilities • Manufacturing • Real Estate & Construction • Hospitality • Pharmaceuticals • Information Technology • SPVs & Holding Structures ACCA-Certified Accountant | Ex-EY Bookkeeping & Financial Reporting Expert 🔹 Who I Work With Businesses needing accurate, audit-ready books not just data entry Private equity funds, SPVs, and real estate holding structures Multinational companies needing multi-currency, multi-entity bookkeeping Businesses with messy or backlogged books needing a full cleanup CPA and accounting firms needing a reliable outsourced partner Growing businesses that need CFO-level insight, not just a bookkeeper 🔹 Why Clients Choose Me 📌 Big Four training, small-business accessibility the same rigor EY clients get, delivered at freelance rates. 📌 Global regulatory fluency hands-on experience across UK, GCC, EU, and South Asian frameworks means I adapt fast to your jurisdiction. 📌 True financial ownership, not just entry I've run finance functions end-to-end, so I understand the "why" behind every number, not just the "where." 📌 Team-backed delivery backed by MRZ Consultants' team of Chartered Accountants and specialists, I can scale support as your business grows. 📌 Confidentiality and precision your financials are handled with institutional-grade discretion and accuracy. Accountant | Big Four-Trained Bookkeeper | 10+ Years Global Experience 🔹 My Process Discovery Call: Understand your business, current bookkeeping state, and reporting needs. Books Assessment: Review existing records to flag errors, gaps, or backlog. Setup or Cleanup: Build or restructure your Chart of Accounts, reconcile accounts, clear backlogs.

I build financial intelligence systems for operations-heavy companies that have outgrown their spreadsheets. My clients typically come to me after they've hired a finance team, bought the BI tool, and still spend 3 days a month manually assembling reports that should take 3 hours. Recent engagements: - Financial Intelligence Platform — $250M public school district. 12-tab executive command center replacing what used to take 3 analysts a full week every month. Now runs in under an hour. - Pricing & Margin System — commercial bakery scaling to wholesale. Density-aware recipe costing across mixed units, catching an error pattern that had been undercosting core ingredients by 100x. Rebuilt the entire batch pricing engine and packaging math in 48 hours. - Automated Reporting Pipeline — 90% reduction in manual data prep. 48,000 rows processed, 6,800 issues auto-resolved on first pass. - Revenue Operations at scale — 5 years building forecasting and payments infrastructure at a platform serving millions of users. Payments operation cleared $300K+ in daily profit at peak. Who I work best with: - Finance and operations leaders at $5M-$100M companies where reporting quality directly affects decisions - Founders scaling past the "spreadsheet as source of truth" phase and needing real infrastructure - CFOs and controllers inheriting reporting systems that need a rebuild without breaking what's working My stack: Excel, Google Sheets, Python, Apps Script, and AI-augmented reporting pipelines that generate real commentary on real numbers, not filler text. How engagements work: - Diagnostic engagement (2 weeks, $3,500) — I map your current reporting stack, identify the top 3 friction points, and deliver a prioritized remediation plan. Most clients use this as the on-ramp to a larger rebuild. - Focused rebuild (4-6 weeks, $8,500-$15,000) — I rebuild a specific reporting surface end-to-end. Board deck automation, monthly close package, variance analysis system, FP&A forecasting model. - Financial Intelligence System — Focused Build (6-10 weeks, $15,000-$35,000) — full rebuild of a reporting workflow with handoff documentation and team training. For smaller or exploratory work, hourly engagements are priced to the scope. Currently: Manager of Financial Operations at a $250M public entity, with five years prior scaling financial data infrastructure at a platform serving millions. I work with two to three external clients at a time. If your team is losing hours a week to manual reporting, or your monthly close is eating days that should be hours, that's the problem I solve.

I’m a controller-level accountant with nearly three decades of experience supporting small to mid-sized businesses through cleanup, growth, and transition periods. My work sits comfortably between detailed hands-on accounting and high-level financial oversight — bringing structure, accuracy, and clarity to environments that are often messy, fast-moving, or overdue for cleanup. I’ve worked across multi-entity structures, service businesses, real estate, construction, and founder-led companies where the books “mostly work” but don’t yet support confident decision-making. Clients come to me when balances don’t tie, systems don’t scale, or reporting needs to be reliable — not just produced. I’m especially strong in: Taking over imperfect QuickBooks or Xero files and making them clean, defensible, and audit-ready Reconciling complex balance sheets (banks, credit cards, loans, equity, intercompany) Establishing consistent month-end close processes and documentation Cleaning up historical activity without disrupting current operations Translating financials into clear explanations for owners and leadership teams I don’t approach accounting as data entry or checkbox bookkeeping. I focus on why numbers look the way they do, what’s missing, and what needs to change so the same issues don’t repeat next month. Core Experience Controller-level oversight for small and growing businesses Full-cycle accounting: AP, AR, payroll entries, accruals, reconciliations Multi-entity accounting, consolidations, and intercompany activity Cleanup projects (QBO, Xero, legacy files, partial implementations) Budgeting, forecasting, and cash-flow visibility CPA coordination, audit prep, and support documentation Process improvement without overengineering Tools QuickBooks Online & Desktop (Advanced cleanup and rebuilds) Xero Excel & Google Sheets (advanced reconciliation and analysis work) I work well independently, communicate clearly, and don’t require heavy supervision. I ask smart questions, flag issues early, and leave systems better than I found them. If you need someone experienced enough to step in, stabilize your accounting, and give you confidence in your numbers — I’m happy to talk through what that looks like.

I am a senior finance executive and fractional CFO with more than 25 years of experience helping organizations improve profitability, strengthen cash flow, scale operations, and make better business decisions. My background spans early-stage startups, founder-led businesses, private equity-backed companies, middle-market organizations, billion-dollar corporations, and a $9 billion global enterprise. I have served in CFO, Vice President of Finance, Senior Director of Finance, Controller, FP&A, and financial systems leadership roles across healthcare, agriculture, wine and beverage, home services, HVAC, construction, transportation, facility services, and technology-enabled businesses. I bring a combination of strategic finance leadership and hands-on execution. I can help a company build reliable forecasts, understand its true profitability, improve reporting, shorten the monthly close, implement better systems, secure financing, manage growth, and turn financial data into practical actions. I have led businesses through startup growth, acquisitions, operational turnarounds, system implementations, organizational change, and rapid expansion. My work has included growing a healthcare organization from approximately $30 million to more than $100 million in revenue, helping scale a startup to $10 million with positive EBITDA, reducing a financial close from 30 days to seven days, producing significant EBITDA improvements, and managing financial oversight for more than $1 billion of corporate spending. I am particularly effective with owners and leadership teams that need experienced financial guidance but may not require—or be ready to hire—a full-time CFO. I quickly identify the most important financial and operational issues, establish clear priorities, and create reporting and planning tools that help leaders manage the business with greater confidence. My objective is straightforward: provide business owners and executives with clearer financial visibility, stronger decision-making support, and an actionable plan to improve cash flow, profitability, and long-term enterprise value.