Provide financial planning, analysis, reporting and modelling support.
The role will support the management reporting, preparation of budgets, forecasts, , financial models, service costing, variance analysis and business cases, ensuring accurate and timely financial information is available for management decision-making.
The position will work closely with Finance, Commercial, Operations, and Shared Services to collect, validate and analyse financial and operational information.
The role is primarily an analytical and execution-focused finance role, supporting Business Partnering who owns the overall business partnering, commercial finance and senior stakeholder engagement agenda.
Management Reporting & MIS
- Prepare monthly management reporting and financial analysis.
- Maintain revenue, cost and profitability schedules.
- Prepare monthly variance analysis and supporting commentary.
- Track key operational and financial KPIs.
- Develop reporting by service/product group.
- Link operational metrics such as services, kilometres, tonnes and ton-kilometres to financial performance.
- Ensure reporting data is complete, accurate and reconciled to the underlying financial information.
- Maintain recurring MIS templates and improve reporting efficiency.
Budgeting & Forecasting
- Support the annual ERF budgeting and forecasting process.
- Collect and consolidate departmental budget inputs.
- Maintain detailed budget working files and financial models.
- Prepare budget versus actual and forecast versus actual analysis.
- Update monthly forecasts based on latest operational and commercial assumptions.
- Maintain the ERF 5-year financial plan and supporting schedules.
- Track changes in volumes, train paths, manpower, fleet, fuel, maintenance, terminal and other operating assumptions.
- Follow up with departments for outstanding budget and forecast inputs.
- Develop and maintain Excel-based financial models.
- Support financial modelling for new services, commercial proposals and operational changes.
- Prepare scenario and sensitivity analysis.
- Analyse revenue, direct costs, contribution margin and operating costs.
- Maintain costing models for different services and routes.
- Support investment and business-case analysis.
- Ensure models are structured, transparent and easy to update.
Commercial Finance Support
- Support the Finance Business Partner with pricing and commercial analysis.
- Prepare service-level cost calculations and profitability analysis.
- Analyse customer, product, route and service profitability.
- Prepare financial schedules and supporting analysis for commercial proposals.
- Maintain pricing and costing databases/models.
Cost & Variance Analysis
- Monitor actual costs against budget and forecast.
- Analyse key cost drivers including:
- Fuel
- Fleet maintenance
- Terminal costs
- Trucking
- Manpower
- Utilities
- Shared services
- Other operating costs
- Investigate material variances and identify underlying drivers.
- Support monthly accrual-to-actual analysis.
- Track recurring and one-off cost movements.
- Assist with cost allocation and cost-centre analysis.
- Extract and consolidate financial and operational data from relevant systems and reports.
- Perform data validation and reconciliation.
- Maintain financial databases and supporting schedules.
- Improve the quality and consistency of financial data used for reporting and planning.
- Develop automated Excel reporting where practical.
- Support the migration of recurring Excel reporting into Power BI or other BI platforms.
Business Case & Decision Support
- Prepare financial schedules for business cases under the direction of the Finance Business Partner.
- Calculate revenue, cost, margin, cash flow, ROI, IRR and payback where applicable.
- Perform sensitivity analysis on key assumptions.
- Maintain supporting documentation and assumptions.
- Provide clear analytical outputs for management presentations and decision papers.
Intercompany & Shared Services Support
- Support analysis of intercompany charges and recharges.
- Maintain supporting calculations for shared-service and corporate allocations.
- Coordinate with SSC to obtain actuals, accruals, invoicing and collection information.
- Reconcile financial information between operational, commercial and accounting records.
- Track outstanding financial information and follow up with relevant stakeholders.
Process Improvement
- Identify opportunities to automate recurring finance processes.
- Improve Excel models, reporting templates and data structures.
- Standardise recurring financial analysis and reporting.
- Reduce manual reporting and duplication of work.
- Support development of Power BI dashboards and automated management reporting.
- Maintain appropriate documentation for key models and processes.
- Monthly MIS and variance analysis
- Budget and forecast working files
- Revenue and cost analysis
- Pricing analysis
- Profitability analysis
- CAPEX/OPEX analysis
- Operational KPI reporting
- Intercompany/recharge calculations
Key Interfaces
- Finance Manager
- Holding Finance
- ERF CEO and management team
- Commercial
- Operations
- Shared Services
- Other corporate functions
Academic Qualifications:
- Finance or Accounting, are preferred fields
Professional Qualifications: -
Experience:
- 5+ years of business finance or other relevant experience
- Strong quantitative and analytical competency
Other Skills:
- Sound knowledge and experience of SAP FI – CO.
- Good working knowledge of Microsoft Excel