Senior Accountant · Family Office Financial Operations

Multi-entity books, closed and reconciled.

I have been an accountant since 2016. Bank and credit operations first, then seven years of family-office work at Direct Information FZC in RAK, UAE. There I carried a $1B+ single-UBO portfolio, kept the books for 20 companies, and ran the intercompany reconciliation across a 40-entity group. Weekly and monthly valuations, UAE VAT, treasury, audit coordination, and supporting the US returns attached to the group's American holdings.

In March 2026 I moved back to Kerala. My background is in accounting, and I use technology to solve practical financial problems. As an accountant, I use it to make the work itself faster and easier, not just tidier to report on. So I use AI to build small private tools for the parts of the close that badly need them. Nine of them now, and more in progress. I also read and write about where AI genuinely helps in a finance function, and where it quietly does not.

2016

Accounting since

$1B+

Portfolio tracked

Entities reconciled

Tools shipped

Track record The tools Where I stand

Kerala, India · Remote (UTC+5:30) or relocation · utharam.in
Full CV, references and certificates available on request.

How I work

The rigour was never the bottleneck. The tooling was.

Cut-off, accruals, intercompany, sign-off: that judgement stays with me, and I would not hand it to a model. What I remove is the friction around it. That is also why every tool runs entirely on your own machine: a client ledger should never have to travel to someone else's server just to be processed. Local-only is a data-governance decision, not a feature.

Track record

Where I closed the books

Seven years in one family office. The scope was genuinely large and genuinely unglamorous, which is the job.

Apr 2026 to present Kerala, India

Career break, spent on study and tooling

Independent

I left RAK in March 2026 by mutual agreement and have used the time deliberately: studying Indian indirect tax and the UAE-India compliance overlap, building the nine local tools listed below with AI assistance, writing about AI in the accounting profession, and designing custom personal assistants for professionals and small businesses. I am not treating this as a closed chapter. I am available for Senior Accountant, Family Office Operations and Fund Reporting roles now, remote or on relocation.

May 2019 to Mar 2026 RAK, UAE

Accountant, Family Office Financial Operations

Direct Information FZC

$1B+ HNI portfolio, weekly and monthly

Maintained valuations for a single-UBO family portfolio: listed equity, ETFs, bonds and alternatives, plus PE/VC capital calls, debt, real estate and credit lines: multi-currency, every week and at every month-end.

20 companies on one desk

I independently managed the accounts of 20 companies inside the group, spanning online advertising, real estate, and investment and holding entities. That covered month, quarter and year-end closes, MIS reporting, and monthly intercompany reconciliation across a 40-entity group.

75,000-line cash-to-accrual rebuild

Rebuilt a single expense sheet running from 2005 across 75,000+ line items, with cash-versus-accrual bifurcation and reconciliation, automated in Excel across 500M+ in assets, depreciation, rent and real-estate capitalisation, with checkpoint integrity.

Payables, treasury, compliance

AP with creditor coordination, vendor and employee expense review, international wires and card settlement, UAE VAT returns, loan documentation, bank and fund KYC, and audit coordination. For the group's US real-estate holdings I prepared the calculations, quarterly estimates, W-9s and books that US CPAs then filed: federal, New York State and New York City returns, including NYC-2 and NYS CT-3. Also kept books across UAE, BVI, Mauritius, Cayman and US entities.

MIS reporting
AP / AR
UAE VAT
Intercompany recon
KYC: banks & funds
Audit coordination
US federal · NYS · NYC
Excel modelling
Tally ERP 9

2016 to 2019 Kerala, India

Accountant

Nedumparambil Credit Syndicate · Thekkuthode Service Co-op Bank

Where the foundations were laid: GL and day-to-day transactions at the bank, including the migration off manual paper ledgers to core banking; then balance-sheet reconciliations, month-end close, cash management and structured internal reporting for credit operations. The periods between those roles went into the CMA Intermediate programme, which is why this reads as one continuous block rather than three posts.

Credentials

Qualifications & systems

Qualifications

CMA Intermediate, ICMAI Cost & Management Accountancy · Completed

M.Com, Accounts & Finance Annamalai University · 2015 to 2017

B.Com MG University, Kerala · 2011 to 2014

English · Hindi · Malayalam Advanced · Upper-intermediate · Native

My working relationship with systems is as the person who specifies, tests and signs off. I can scope an accounting requirement end to end and brief a vendor or a developer precisely, which is usually the bottleneck anyway.

Day-to-day systems

Multi-entity reporting
Portfolio valuation
Intercompany reconciliation
Cash vs. accrual modelling
Month / quarter / year-end close
MIS reporting
UAE VAT
AP / AR & creditor coordination
Treasury & payments
KYC: banks & funds
Audit coordination
Tally ERP 9
Advanced Excel

Currently picking up Indian indirect tax and the UAE-India compliance overlap, so I can hold a group that straddles both.

Tooling

The tools came second. On purpose.

Not a product line. Nine utilities, each one born from a specific thing that went wrong on a real close. I understand the problem first, then build the right tool to solve it, and test every output against the books. The frameworks underneath are an implementation detail. All of it runs client-side: no login, no server, no data leaves the machine.

SheetHound , the spreadsheet watchdog

Flagship

The problem. Before a workbook goes to a client or an auditor, nobody has time to check what is still inside it. Broken external links that point at someone else's file. Cascading #REF! errors from a single deleted row. Sheets that were hidden rather than deleted. Numbers that quietly stopped agreeing with the source. You find these out after you send it.

The fix. SheetHound opens the workbook in the browser and runs a pre-flight forensic pass before anything leaves your desk: lineage on every formula, external links traced, hidden XML sheets unmasked, and typography hygiene flagged. It never uploads the file, because the file is the client's confidential information.

Launch SheetHound Why local-only

Pre-flight report

External links0 ghost links

Formula precedentsall clean

#REF! cascadesnone

Very-hidden sheets1 unmasked

File uploadedno

LedgerDuck Audit

Auditing a 200k-row general ledger or trial balance means Excel falls over, and pasting it into a hosted SQL tool means the client's ledger now lives on someone else's machine. LedgerDuck runs DuckDB-Wasm in the browser, rejects merged cells and non-rectangular dumps before they reach a query, and adds one-click checks for split payments and materiality outliers.

Launch Repo
Excel Cleaner Audit

ERP exports arrive with merged rows, non-breaking spaces, text-formatted numbers and rogue date stamps, and the pivot table then quietly totals wrongly. This sanitises the dump with an explicit column mapping and true numeric casting, and never defaults a missing value to zero, which is the mistake that actually costs you an audit day.

Launch Repo
GST Interactive Indian indirect tax

A double-entry GST ledger simulator paired with a 64-provision statutory reference and the Supreme Court rulings behind them. Set-off under GSTR-3B and the Rule 86B cash limits stop being abstract once you have to post them. Part of the current study, and directly usable.

Launch
InvoiceCraft Billing

Billing SaaS wants a subscription and, in exchange, holds your client list on its own servers. This stores invoices, clients and templates in local IndexedDB instead, with multi-tax splits, sequential numbering, currency in words and vector PDF export.

Launch
AgroShop Manager GST · retail

Built for the shop I could see from here: Kerala agro retail, where unregistered farmer purchases arrive with no invoice and the reverse charge still has to be paid. Point-of-sale and stock PWA that auto-balances RCM, tracks leases, and keeps running when the internet does not.

Launch
Narration Generator Close

Re-typing the rollover journal every morning as rates move is how errors get in. This carries a working-day banking calendar, calculates daily interest, chains balances forward, and writes the cheque amount in words. No network calls at all.

Launch Repo
LexHop Reader Research

Statutory documents are dense, cross-referenced, and slow to read in a generic PDF viewer. Keyword-in-context concordance, abbreviation guards, and a side-by-side clause comparison tray, with the document itself never leaving the device.

Launch Repo
Main Deck Workflow

A generic task app forgets that the work is cyclical. This keeps the month-end closing checklist and SOP reading in one offline surface, tracks intervals factually, and exports everything as JSON so nothing is ever trapped in someone else's database.

Launch Repo

Also in progress: Flowbook, a hybrid event-and-double-entry model. Currently exploring: custom personal assistants, tuned for professionals and small businesses, built outward from the accounting workflows I know best.

Where I stand

Pro-AI. Still sceptical.

Five pieces I have written this year. They are the argument I actually hold, not a commentary on somebody else's, grouped by whether they are about AI in a finance function or about working beside it.

I use AI every working day and I would not want to go back to not using it. It has made me materially faster at the parts of accounting that are typing, formatting, reconciling and checking. It has also made it very easy to be confidently wrong, which in this profession is expensive.

So the line is narrow and I hold it firmly. AI takes the problem, never the confidential data, and never the sign-off. Double-entry, cut-off, intercompany, and the judgement that a number is wrong before anyone can prove it, human, every time. The nine tools above exist because of that line rather than in spite of it.

On AI in a finance function

On working alongside AI

Contact

Let's talk about a close, or a role.

Open to Senior Accountant, Family Office Operations and Fund Reporting roles, remote from India (UTC+5:30) or relocation. Available now. I would rather answer a specific question about a portfolio or a group structure than send a generic CV.

samcmaliyakel@gmail.com Request CV & references

Everything a CV would tell you is on this page, in more detail than a CV would. What I keep off it: my phone number, employment and examination certificates, and professional references. I would rather hand those over directly in a first exchange rather than publish them.

GitHub Medium utharam.in