Commercial Finance Manager

Commercial Finance Manager

London

Competitive Plus Benefits 

Our family history websites and digital products help millions of people around the world colour in the stories of their past. We aim to take our services to a new level of excellence, reaching new audiences and allowing people to discover and share their stories in exciting ways.

As the primary person responsible for all finance matters within the company, the Commercial Finance Manager is an extremely high profile role and will cover a wide array of different activities, giving the incumbent fantastic experience working in a digital, tech and product-focused environment.

The primary responsibility of the Commercial Finance Manager is to lead all commercial finance activity for the company, including forecasting & resource planning, analysis & insight, and adhoc decision support. This is a highly commercial role, reporting into the Company COO and supporting the Exec team. Developing and running the group budgeting and reforecasting processes, delivering the month end Business Performance Review Pack for the Board, providing financial support to investment decisions and structure to potential partnerships.

Sound technical knowledge is also required in order to ensure the month end close process delivers accurate and timely reporting, that system implementations deliver efficient results tailored to our needs, and that internal process compliance is high.

Responsibilities

Leadership

• Take a proactive and authoritative role in developing, enhancing or redesigning key Finance processes.
• Act as commercial finance lead on system implementations, both configurations and modifications.
• Ensure that the rest of the business, especially the non-finance community, are compliant with key processes and controls.
• Help the business streamline their processes to increase productivity while ensuring adequate controls are still in place, notably around capital expenditure and purchase order raising/paying.
• Direct management of a newly qualified FP&A analyst, as well as acting as coordination point for the relationship with the shared services centre in Dundee (who are responsible for all management accounting and transaction processing)

Business Operations

• Ensure the delivery of accurate and insightful monthly reporting, principally through the Business Performance Review Pack.
• Coordinate and challenge the input from other areas of the business – seek to continually improve on the quality of the product.
• Lead the annual budgeting process, ensuring that the process delivers the required level of rigour without being overly onerous, either for the finance team or its busienss partners.
• Develop a quarterly rolling, reforecast process, gauged to the right level of detail, and providing actionable content for the Exec. Also create early in-month warning systems to identify likely financial outcomes for the period.
• Develop quality modelling capability, allowing support of business partners in their key decision-making, notably around investment appraisal decisions, acquisitions, fund-raising.

Relationship Management 

The Commercial Finance manager must :

• Develop close and effective working relations with the COO, the Exec and key senior managers within the company. 
• Establish collaborative working relations with his / her peers in the Analytics team, as well as the Financial Reporting team based in Dundee. 
• Develop good working relations with appropriate members of the Parent Group’s support teams (notably HR and IT), as well as key Board members.

Essential skills and experience

• Qualified Accountant, ACA, CIMA, ACCA
• 4-6 years PQE experience in industry
• Experience of leading budgeting and forecasting processes
• Experience of partnering with non-Finance colleagues
• Experience of contributing to commercial analysis, insight and reporting

Desirable skills and experience

•  University Degree
•  MBA
•  Experience of online publishing, subscription-based or other digital companies
•  Experience with corporate HO consolidation and reporting functions systems (e.g. Microsoft Dynamics)

Personal qualities

•  Independent thinking
•  Strong problem solving skills
•  Personal motivation
•  High energy levels
•  Strong work ethic
•  Trustworthy judgement
•  Ability to work without significant supervision
•  High personal integrity
•  Great team work orientation
•  Strong decision-making skills
•  Ability to be focused and organised
•  Ability to lead through and manage change
•  High adaptability and desire to improve their environment
•  Approachable and able to present the “friendly face” of Finance