Commerical Finance Analyst in London

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:

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 (e.g. 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): Execute 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; coordination of inputs; aggregation for review by FD and local leadership; acting as 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, coordinating 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, contributing to and supporting 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) or CIMA (Chartered Institute of Management Accountants).

Our Package: 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. 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. Our policies are forward thinking and industry leading and heavily contribute to our outstanding culture.

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.

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.