Job Title: Finance Business Partner
Salary: £45,000 - £55,000 per annum (DOE)
Working Days: Monday – Friday
Benefits: 25 Days Annual Leave + Banks, Private Health Cover, Pension, Life Assurance + Additional Benefits
The Role:
As Finance Business Partner in our specialist chemicals, fuels and gases logistics business, no two days will be the same. One day you might be producing margin analysis for one of our big contracts and the next day you’ll be calculating the impact of switching fuel suppliers or running a job using a different route. This is a commercially focussed role with minimal management accounting or financial accounting responsibilities. Instead you’ll be focussed on working with a number of internal and customer stakeholders to provide value add financial analysis and help to drive results for our business. You’ll be given plenty of support to get up and running in this role, then once you are, you’ll be given a high degree of autonomy to manage your own workload and in many cases to identify your own tasks and priorities. It requires an individual with the confidence and experience to influence people and drive results within a multi-site operational environment. You must be highly commercial and able to communicate detailed insight to non-finance professionals.
Reporting into our Head of Financial Planning & Analysis, you will work closely with the Operations Director and Regional Directors; who will look to you, to truly partner with them and drill down beneath the surface of the numbers to understand the finance function at Suttons.
The successful candidate needs to be someone who can not only perform detailed financial analysis, but can also identify actions from this and work with management to make changes. You will need to be equally good at communication and managing relationships as well as financial analysis and accounting.
Key Accountabilities:
• Develop an understanding of the commercial charging mechanisms for key customer accounts and use this knowledge to confirm that we are charging customers accurately and capturing all billing opportunities.
• Perform regular profitability analysis on key customer accounts and identify actions to improve margins.
• Identifying changes to resource levels, how jobs are operated, labour cost controls, etc which will improve results and working with management to implement these changes.
• Produce the annual budget and quarterly reforecasts for a number of our contracts / depots.
• Produce the weekly flash P&L and monthly management accounts for a number of our contracts/depots.
• Perform analysis and sense checks over weekly revenue to ensure accuracy and identify any trends.
• Playing a lead role in significant projects within the finance team – acquisitions, new contract wins, system changes, etc.
• Conducting a review of each week’s results and making recommendations to management with regard to staffing, fleet, and overheads, following up to ensure that these recommendations are actioned.
• Forecasting and financial modelling to understand the impact of making certain changes to resource levels, commercial rates, how jobs are operated, etc.
• Ad-hoc analysis for the Finance Director, Operations Director or Regional Directors based on current events or results.
• Helping to design and implement the processes to account for revenue and costs in relation to new contract wins or acquisitions
• Support the Management Accountants with some of the key reconciliations (fuel, maintenance costs, etc).
Required Experience:
• Qualified or part qualified CIMA, ACCA or ACA accountant or alternatively someone with several years of accounting experience.
• Good Excel skills and used to analysing large amounts of data in spreadsheets.
• A confident communicator who is able to challenge people and change behaviours within an operational environment.
• Experience of process improvement, who can identify where processes aren’t working, can recommend new processes and help management to roll these out to operational staff.
• Someone who likes to be hands on and become a real partner in a fast-moving business
The Package:
In return, you will receive a very competitive salary and you will also benefit from a company pension scheme, paid holidays (25 days + 8 bank holidays), cycle to work scheme, tech scheme and the opportunities that come with a strong, established and growing company.
In addition, Suttons provide every UK employee with access to Suttons Perks, our Employee Assistance Programme and reward platform. Suttons Perks provides discounts to 100s of top name brands, high street offers, and holidays, as well as Employee Wellbeing and Support.
The Company:
Established in 1926, Suttons Group is an innovative, global logistics business, Employing over 1,000 people worldwide and with £190 million in sales, our global network includes 31 locations across Asia, 5 locations throughout Europe, plus our 32 sites in the UK, 5 locations in the Middle East and 4 locations in the Americas.
We have a fleet of 8,000 tank containers, 500 trucks, and 700 trailers. We carry out 170,000+ shipments per year - that equates to a delivery every 3 minutes!
In the UK, Suttons Road Tankers operates a nationwide road tanker fleet which has been successfully serving the fuels, gases, chemicals and food sectors for over 60 years, and is the largest chemical transporter in the UK.
Suttons Group are one of the UK’s market leaders in the distribution and transportation of bulk chemicals, fuel, gasses and powders. We are rightly proud of our history but are very much focussed on growing our business and continuing to be the logistics partner of choice for some of the UK’s largest businesses.
To ensure that we remain agile and cost focussed, we are currently recruiting a Finance Business Partner to be based at our Stockton site.
This is a key role within our rapidly growing business and it will have immediate and regular exposure to our directors and senior stakeholders. As such there is a very clear opportunity for someone to make a strong impression and progress their career within Suttons.
Please note, all offers of employment are subject to valid Right to Work documentation, completion of a Basic DBS check and Drug and Alcohol screening prior to start.
If this Finance Business Partner role looks right for you, please apply now to be considered for the position.