Head of Financial Planning & Analysis

Ultra; Cheltenham; On-site; GBP 60,000 - 80,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading finance organization is seeking a Finance Business Partner in Cheltenham, UK. This role involves leading financial planning and analytics, closely collaborating with senior management. The ideal candidate will have a strong finance background, experience in business partnering, and skills in project management. Responsibilities include overseeing financial reporting, forecasting, and supporting strategic planning initiatives. The position offers an engaging work environment within a diverse and inclusive employer.

Benefits

Diverse and inclusive workplace

Opportunities for professional development

Qualifications

• Experience leading financial analysis and reporting.
• Ability to manage a finance team effectively.
• Strong commercial acumen with analytical skills.

Responsibilities

• Lead financial forecasting and monthly reporting.
• Collaborate with senior management on finance strategies.
• Manage the Business Intelligence team's reporting needs.

Skills

Financial analysis

Business partnering

Data management

Forecasting

Stakeholder management

Education

Degree in Finance or related field

Tools

OneStream

IFS

Business intelligence software

Job description

Description

The Ultra Finance function leads the budgeting and forecasting processes and supports the strategy process, as well as managing performance against budget. In addition, it ensures that effective financial controls are in operation in all businesses to ensure stewardship of the Group's assets. It ensures compliance with best professional standards, statutory financial requirements and fiscal provision and undertakes tax planning activities and ensure that the Group's tax reporting duties are discharged. It ensures that the Group has adequate long-term funding to meet the requirements of its Strategic Plan and supports M&A.

To design and deliver impactful FP&A, including Finance Business Partnering, across the PCS UK and US entities with oversight of FP&A at the CEMS business. This role will have a sizeable commercial angle to it, with the individual expected to help generate meaningful value within the business. This role also has management responsibility for the Business Intelligence team.

This role will report directly to the CFO. The role will work very closely with the Financial Controller, forming a key finance leadership team.

This role will be tasked with responsibility and ownership of :

• Leading the analytics associated with monthly Actuals reporting, including variances to Budget, Forecast, Prior Year etc. Analysis will cover all aspects of the P&L, especially focusing on revenue and margins within Value Streams (i.e. platforms, portfolios, part numbers etc)
• The creation and production of meaningful MI to support the timely and robust month end close, culminating in the production of a high-quality, timely and complete proposed (finance) board report to be prepared for the CFO
• Leading the weekly Flash forecasting process, the output of which will be a forecast of orders, revenue, contribution margin, gross margin, IRAD, opex and EBITDA BOO, together with Operating Cash BOO for the current and subsequent two months (i.e. a 3 month rolling forecast). The output should be commercially insightful (with risk & opportunities and variance analysis for example) and should have the buy-in of the key business stakeholders. Actions arising should be noted and project managed to a timely conclusion
• Leading the Quarterly and annual Budget forecasting processes to agreed timelines, based on meaningful and detailed supporting schedules built on bottom-up and analysable data sources. The process should be managed through an integrated financial model with appropriate automation and clearly and easily identifiable assumptions. The output will comprise of a high quality, insightful presentation pack aligned to a complete and timely OneStream data submission
• Working collaboratively across the business to lead the annual creation, submission and subsequent periodic refreshes of the 5 year Strategic Plan. The Strategic Plan will cover the front end of the business and project financially through a P&L, Balance Sheet and Cashflow. The process should ensure a robust audit trail which is relatively easy for a reviewer to navigate their way through. The ultimate output will be a significant presentation pack providing analysis of the business through the prism of numerous different cuts and slices of the business
• Developing and maintaining deep and meaningful margin analysis tools providing insight on historical and projected margins across the product range within the business. The analysis must be intrinsically linked and reconcilable to the General Ledger. The analysis should be produced in a way that enables finance and non-finance users of the tool to identify margins and make impactful decisions based on this information
• Leading the creation and evolution of a robust, granular and well-presented MI suite, providing meaningful insight on business metrics in a timely fashion
• Be the point Finance person for interacting with, and supporting the S&O process, as well as ensuring it is fully integrated with financial forecasts. To enable this a keen interest will be required to ensure the Opportunities Tracker remains relevant for financial forecasting purposes

Finance Business Partnering

Working very closely with the VP of Engineering and COO, providing day to day business partnering support, being a key member of their functional senior management, offering finance support, guidance and leadership to them and their teams

• Embedding a culture of managing finance by operational metrics. Lead on the creation, capture, streamlining, cleansing and challenge of all financial operational metrics including key elements such as labour utilisation, efficiency, standard costs including labour routings, absorption, turnaround times etc
• Be the point person for providing commercial finance leadership to the Repairs business, supporting growth in the business and improvement in margins. Additionally, working closely with the Financial Controller to provide financial comfort and controls of the warranty reserve, identifying opportunities to reduce the financial impact and identifying trends in warranty exposure
• Partner in the creation of financially meaningful business cases for investment in IRAD, capitalised development, impairment testing etc
• Finance lead on targeting and driving VCP opportunities
• Working very closely with the Financial Controller (and team), especially to support the timely and accurate submission of month end reporting, year end audits, project accounting, bid submission and associate cost audits, and by providing insight and input to support meaningful balance sheet reconciliations on areas with significant Engineering or Operations underlying ownership
• Leading the Business Intelligence team to improve the quality of data, reporting and systems across the business. Partner with the business to understand key business requirements, reporting challenges, manual processes and the like, transforming them through a structured program management approach into live, accurate, meaningful reports which are based on data which is integrally tied to the financials within the business
• Identify opportunities to make improvements to IFS for capture of data, improvement of processes, creation of robust master data etc
• Driving consistency of approach across all aspects of PCS and CEMS
• Support ad hoc projects that may arise from time to time

Nationality Requirements

Candidates must be able to work in the UK without restrictions in accordance with UK National Law and be prepared to successfully undertake an appropriate level of UK National Security Vetting according to UK Government National Security Vetting criteria.

Diverse & Inclusive Employer

Ultra PCS is an equal opportunities employer that values diversity, inclusion, equity and equality. Underpinned by our values, behaviours, and policies, we want you to feel empowered to be your best and authentic self.

We promote a workplace that welcomes people from all backgrounds and cultures; believing that this will increase our diversity of thinking, and ultimately ensure we continue delivering on our commitments to our customers.

We do not discriminate based on race, religion, colour, national origin, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status and welcome applications from all candidates.