Senior Commercial Financial Analyst in Manchester

As a Senior Commercial Finance Analyst, you will ensure that commercial decisions across Europe are made using consistent, robust, and governed profitability logic, while enabling a scalable governed decision-support capability. This role sits at the heart of European Commercial Finance Decision Support. The objective is to own, operate and evolve profitability and pricing models used to support strategic pricing, customer negotiations and governance decisions across Europe. The role acts as a bridge between finance, commercial and analytics, ensuring cost logic integrity, decision readiness and scalability. This position can be based in Manchester, Madrid or Clichy.

Key Responsibilities May Include:

• Conduct comprehensive financial analysis, including profitability reviews, variance analysis, and financial modelling, to support business decisions and optimize performance.
• Prepare and manage monthly, quarterly, and annual budgets and forecasts, ensuring accuracy and alignment with strategic business goals.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams (e.g., supply chain, commercial, sales) to provide actionable insights that enhance financial decision-making and operational outcomes.
• Provide analytical support for business case development, cost analysis, and evaluation of strategic initiatives to ensure informed decision-making.
• Drive process improvements by supporting the implementation and optimization of financial tools, automation efforts, and standardized processes.
• Perform post-investment reviews to assess the performance of strategic initiatives and recommend corrective actions where needed.
• Support efforts to improve reporting, forecasting, and financial data quality, ensuring timely and accurate consolidation of financial information.
• Support ad-hoc financial analysis and special projects, including pricing strategies, cost savings initiatives, and performance tracking, to drive business improvements.

Profitability & Costing Model (Authority & Integrity):

• Own and continuously evolve the European standard profitability and costing logic, including allocation logic, cost coverage principles and underlying assumptions.
• Ensure full alignment of profitability logic with P&L structure, cost architecture and approved cost-to-serve principles.
• Review existing methodologies to identify risks, inconsistencies or structural gaps and define robust, compliant alternatives where required.
• Ensure consistent and governed application of profitability logic across countries, customers, and commercial use cases.
• Act as the reference point for profitability logic used in commercial and contractual assessment.

Capability & Adoption (Risk Reduction Focus):

• Enable Commercial Finance users to correctly use and interpret profitability models through structured training and clear guidance.
• Improve understanding of key cost drivers, KPIs and model mechanics.
• Support consistent adoption of standard methodologies and tools across Europe.
• Contribute to the design, validation and implementation of a unified European Sales Model and ensure that changes are controlled, documented and auditable.
• Support the transition and adoption from multiple scenarios of a unified Sales Model across Europe.
• Own the business logic embedded in commercial finance tools.
• Drive digitalization initiative to automate model processes, reduce manual intervention, improve robustness and user experience.

Strategic Initiatives (Cost Clarity Development):

• Partner with the Cost Clarity Manager to define requirements and ensure effective integrations of cost clarity principles into the Sales Model and adoption across Europe.

Experience:

• Minimum 5 years of experience in a similar position.
• Finance experience with complex, multinational organizations.
• Experience working with profitability, costing or pricing models in a governance context.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in finance/accounting or in relevant finance technical discipline.
• Master’s Degree (e.g. Finance, Business Administration, Accounting) or professional accounting qualification would be a plus.

Skills and Knowledge:

• Strong financial and analytical capability with advanced financial modelling skills.
• Ability to understand, structure and maintain cost and profitability logic within a governed framework.
• High level financial modeling skills & advanced Excel skills, VBA and Power BI/data analytics skills desirable.
• Strong attention to detail and methodological rigor given the scale and financial impact of decision supported.
• Confident stakeholder management skills with the ability to challenge constructively and defend methodology.
• Comfortable operating in ambiguous situations within a structured governance framework.
• Commercial acumen with demonstrated strength in solving both structured and unstructured problems.
• Ability to prioritise effectively & operate autonomously within a collaborative, deadline & result driven environment.
• Strong interpersonal skills enabling effective collaboration across teams.

Languages:

• Other European Language would be a plus.