Finance Business Partner

Are you a finance Business Partner looking for your next role?

Do you have a Partnering mindset with effective stakeholder management skills?

Are you a Self-starter with the ability to manage the regular deliverables?

In the Position of a finance business partner, you are charged with the responsibility of understanding and driving a products profitability. Fundamentally understanding each line within the product P&L and the levers we can pull to drive profitable growth. We must also have a view on how we leverage the integrator strategy to support delivery of not only our own product financial performance but that of the Area.

A key responsibility of the role is the ability to build a reliable and trusted budget / forecast, one that the product teams can use to build an appropriate product offering and give our sales function direction. This means understanding customer verticals, market conditions, world and local macro-economic factors that ultimately not only have impact how we as a company trade and operate but the impact this has on our customers business.

Upon building a budget and a forecast we need to continually steer the organisation to realise its ambition, looking for opportunities to maximise growth, improve profit margins, consider how we procure and how we track productivity and efficiencies within execution. This means anchoring communication across many functions and teams to bring clarity to the overall performance and presenting this to the management board who ultimately decide how we move forward.   

Role Responsibilities

• Be a trusted business partner for the Area Management and Product teams, assuring that the drivers and levers for achieving the business targets are well understood and applied appropriately
• Financial results reported periodically reflect a true and fair representation of underlying business whereby exposures are visible and where required included in the financial results.
• Ensure visibility and offer insight on P&L performance (Revenue, Gross Profit, EBITDA & EBIT) to form part of the MOS cycle
• Financial modelling and analysis related to CAPEX/Leases/M&A, to be included in Investment Proposals and following performance tracking and follow-up
• Be supportive in customer and new Product implementations
• Support Product & Functional Transformation

Key Responsibilities

Tasks Rolling Forecast (ROFO)

• Build and maintain product budget and forecast with consideration to volume, variable cost, staffing costs and other direct operational expense
• On a monthly basis understand and provide insights to the product P&L, deviation from budget and/or forecast and key actions to deliver full year outlook
• Maintain always are bottom-up forecast of full year and importantly detailed next 3 months based on factual data provided by our customers, trends in market conditions and potential operational / financial headwinds we could face
• Quarterly validation and bridge to original budget, understanding where the risks are in our previous assumptions and how we can improve the accuracy of budgeting moving forward

Tasks Driving Profitable Growth

• Understanding target markets, achievable profit margins and lucrative trade lanes and opportunities
• Clear understanding of risks to P&L, job costing accuracy and mitigation of losses through commercial, Cargo claims or operational errors
• Understanding of productivity drivers and working closely with execution teams to refine efficiency of product
• Maximize opportunities within the product to make more money, can we bundle services, better utilize assets tweak our supply chain to increase efficiency or reduce cost to serve  

Tasks Other

• Support Product with relevant performance metric
• Support development and review of strategic initiatives
• Establish monthly pre-close estimates
• Help with or create financial modelling where necessary

Required knowledge & Skills

• Financial acumen and qualification (Degree, CIMA, ACCA or equivalent)
• Experience from working as a Business Partner, or from similar roles acting as an advisor towards management and/or business stakeholders (FP&A, or similar)
• Partnering mindset – effective stakeholder management skills and able to build effective trusted relationships, connecting with stakeholders/teams in the organization
• Self-starter – able to manage the regular deliverables with the ad hoc and to identify where to invest more time for the better outcome – without requiring step by step guidance
• Solves complexity based on accurate identification of underlying factors/causes and is aware of the impact of proposed solutions outside their own immediate area.