UK - Commercial Finance Analyst

Incubeta; London; On-site; GBP 50,000 - 70,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading digital marketing firm in London is seeking a Finance Partner to provide operational finance support, manage budgeting and forecasting, and ensure financial governance. This role requires a strong analytical mindset and a bachelor's degree in a relevant field. The ideal candidate will also hold a professional accounting qualification and demonstrate solid financial skills. This position offers competitive salary and benefits along with performance-related bonuses.

Benefits

Health care

Gym memberships

Additional pension

Qualifications

• Strong analytical skills and technical expertise.
• Experience in financial planning and forecasting.
• Ability to build relationships across teams.

Responsibilities

• Provide accurate data for operational and tactical decisions.
• Manage budgeting, forecasting, and variance analysis processes.
• Implement financial controls and risk management.
• Support financial operations and process optimization.

Skills

Financial analysis

Attention to detail

Problem-solving

Operational finance knowledge

Education

Bachelor's degree in Accounting, Finance, Economics or Business Studies

ACCA or CIMA qualification

Job description

Overview & Primary Responsibilities

This role provides operational and tactical finance support to the UK Finance Director and the regional business, focusing on the day-to-day management of the UK’s financial performance, including P&L, balance sheet, and cash flow. The role plays a key part in executing financial reporting, budgeting, and forecasting cycles, ensuring visibility and accuracy of data and key KPIs.

This position is a hands-on finance role, focused on delivering accurate financial data and analyses as required by the FD to support the UK business's operational decisions.

It requires someone with strong technical expertise as well as strong analytical skills, attention to detail, and the ability to proactively identify and resolve operational finance issues. Beyond the immediate task, the ideal candidate can step back to understand the broader business context and strategic implications, acting accordingly to support overall objectives.

Success in this role depends on a meticulous mindset and strong financial skillset. We’re looking for someone who demonstrates initiative, curiosity, and a willingness to delve into the numbers. You’ll need to think practically, solve problems efficiently, and proactively identify areas for process improvement. The right person will take full ownership of their operational remit, step up in moments of ambiguity, seek guidance when needed, and consistently deliver value through accurate and timely financial support.

This role has 4 primary outcomes

1. Support Decision-Making Through Timely Financial Analysis

Provide accurate data and analyses that support operational and tactical decisions, aids in optimizing pricing and margin, and helps sustain business growth.

1. Execute Robust Financial Planning & Forecasting Cycles

Manage and execute accurate budgeting, forecasting, and variance analysis processes in partnership with the respective teams, ensuring financial targets are clearly understood and tracked.

1. Strengthen Financial Governance & Operational Controls

Implement and maintain strong financial controls, assist in risk management, and partner with shared services to drive operational efficiency, cash flow performance, and compliance.

1. Act as an Effective and Supportive Business Partner

Build strong relationships across non-finance teams, helping to increase financial and commercial understanding, and support initiatives that drive operational improvements in line with FD and MD requirements.

Key Responsibilities

Responsibility 1: Be a trusted business partner (Operational Focus)

• Act as a finance partner and point of contact for the UK teams, driving operational finance matters to resolution, escalating, or redirecting as necessary.
• Leverage group reporting tools or projects (e.g. Planful, Radiance) to deliver relevant, accurate and timely data and analyses that inform commercial and operational decisions—such as gross profit ratios and trends, margin performance, and client trends.
• Provide accurate, timely reporting (e.g. UK Financial performance tracker, MBR templates, reporting decks for local management) to support business reviews.
• Update as required financial models (eg commercial calculator) used by the business.
• Support strategic and transformation projects (e.g. Project Radiance) with commercial acumen and financial analysis, ensuring operational delivery and impact.
• Help non-finance teams understand and apply basic financial principles in day-to-day decisions, building their financial and commercial capability.

Responsibility 2: Financial Planning and Analysis (Execution & Monitoring)

• Executes the budgeting and forecasting processes in line with group timelines, ensuring accuracy, clarity, and alignment with strategic goals set by the FD. This includes:
  • Issuing of templates, guidelines and timelines to the respective teams;
  • Co-ordination of inputs;
  • Aggregation for review by FD and local leadership
  • Acting a first point of review to minimise errors and misalignment before management review
  • Entry into Planful
  • Facilitate expeditious revisions to the numbers
• Proactively challenge budget/forecast submissions at an operational level to ensure they are realistic, data-driven, and commercially sound.
• Monitor financial performance against budget/forecast/prior year on a monthly basis, reporting key variances, investigating driving factors and providing reporting accordingly.
• Own the local “GP spreadsheet”, updating budgets & forecasts, co-ordinating input and maintaining structure to reflect changes in the business.

Responsibility 3: Governance & risk management

• Provide guidance and training to operational teams on financial processes, policies, and controls to promote consistency and compliance.
• Monitor (where relevant) for compliance to such policies, processes and controls as well as with local laws and regulations.
• Partner with financial shared services teams to resolve queries efficiently and maintain smooth day-to-day financial operations
• Collaborate with the Group Audit & Tax Manager to address all relevant queries in a timely manner.

Responsibility 4: Financial Operations (Direct Ownership & Improvement)

• Support the FD in terms of deep dive analysis and interrogation of the P&L, balance sheet, and cash flow for UK entities, with operational support from the South Africa-based financial shared services teams.
• Collaborate with shared services (R2R, P2P, O2C) to improve financial operations, drive efficiencies, and ensure scalable, high-quality service delivery. This includes:
  • Feeding back to shared service teams on challenges experienced.
  • Ensuring that these are acknowledged and holding SSC teams accountable for improvement.
  • Monitoring for recurring issues and escalating to FD or Senior Finance as required.
• Support transformation initiatives across finance operations, including process optimisation, billing automation, and system enhancements. This would include:
  • Supporting on business adoption and feedback
• Contribute to and support a culture of continuous improvement within the finance function, encouraging innovation and operational excellence.
• Support on market specific and non-standard finance matters (e.g., affiliate network arrangements), where knowledge & experience of shared services is limited.

Professional Qualifications

The ideal candidate will possess a bachelor's degree in either Accounting, Finance, Economics or Business Studies (with a strong finance component) and preferably hold one of the following Professional Accounting Qualifications:

• ACCA (Association of Chartered Certified Accountants)
• CIMA (Chartered Institute of Management Accountants)

Our Package

Salary

Incubeta pay industry benchmark salaries. Salary is reviewed on a regular basis and can increase as you progress along your career path. We also offer additional performance related bonuses, so we can be found above the industry benchmark on pay alone.

Benefits

We have a credit-based benefits package which allows you to choose from a range of benefits including health care, additional pension, gym memberships and more.

Policies

Our policies are forward thinking and industry leading and heavily contribute to our outstanding culture. You can view a few of them here.

Learning and Development

We have an in-house team of learning specialists who will ensure a smooth transition into your role and the wider business. As a minimum, you’ll have a forward looking development review every 6 months to discuss your career goals and our L&D team will be on hand to support you to get there.

Our unique hiring process

We are an equal opportunities employer and are committed to a policy of Equal Employment Opportunity and are determined to ensure that no applicant or employee receives less favourable treatment on the grounds of gender, age, disability, religion, belief, sexual orientation, marital status, or ethnicity, or is disadvantaged by conditions or requirements which cannot be shown to be justifiable.

As such we use an anonymised recruitment process. When you hit apply you’ll first be asked some questions about you, if you feel comfortable, we’d love for you to provide as much information as you can. Your data will be anonymous and will not be shared. It will only be used to help us understand how we are performing against our equal opportunities metrics and where we might need to make improvements. After that you’ll be asked to answer some questions that are related to the day-to-day role. Your answers will go through our sift process where they’ll be anonymised, randomised and then reviewed by a panel of reviewers.

If you are shortlisted, we’ll invite you to the next step, which includes two or three interviews.

We love giving feedback, and you’ll be well informed of your progress throughout the application process.