Finance Business Partner

We are recruiting for a Commercial Business Partner to join our Finance team in Bristol. This is a new and exciting role which brings the opportunity to be part of a growing commercial business partnering function. Key to the delivery of the firm’s profitability and pricing strategies, this role is an opportunity to have a real influence on the business. You will be a true partner, building close relationships with senior management in order to gain a strong fundamental understanding of operations, analysing and modelling to identify opportunities, working with management to build plans to capitalise on these, and being a key part of delivery within a cross functional team.

Your Role

• Performance Improvement: fee-earning group
• Builds strong relationships with all partners of assigned fee-earning group and leverages these relationships to deliver commercial benefit.
• Through analysis and discussion identifies areas of the fee-earning group where profit improvement activities are required, and builds buy in from senior stakeholders to solve these challenges.
• Builds profitability improvement plans with the responsible partners.
• Initiates and takes a lead on delivery on these profit improvement initiatives, working with a cross functional team.
• Supports team leaders in presenting profit improvement plans and analysis to the Operations Board where required.
• Builds financial literacy of fee earners through effective coaching where required.
• Combines financial analysis with a strong knowledge of the business to create clarity on financial performance which drives profitability improving action.
• Challenges and engages senior stakeholders to deliver performance against budget and performance improvement plans.
• Drives a focus on working capital improvement.
• Plays an active part in assigned fee-earning group’s management meetings.
• Ad hoc reporting and analysis
• Takes a lead on the creation of pricing proposals, including adopting novel solutions to meet client needs while delivering improved profitability for the firm.
• Presents pricing proposals to the pricing governance board.
• Drives improvement in pricing practices through a lessons learnt framework.
• Ensures pricing lessons and approaches from across the firm are leveraged within assigned fee-earning group.
• Performance Improvement – Finance Operations
• Creates monthly analysis and commentary on assigned fee-earning group’s performance for board reporting.
• The main point of contact for Finance with assigned fee-earning group and champions finance.
• Facilitates finance improvement projects where there is an impact in assigned fee-earning group.
• Works with the Commercial Reporting team to drive improvements to standardised analysis which reduce requirements for ad hoc analysis.
• Support finance process, reporting, and analysis improvement projects.
• Provides direct feedback from the fee-earning groups on finance operations enabling improvement.
• Runs budgeting and reforecasting processes in assigned fee-earning group.

Your Skills and Experience

• Qualified accountant (CIMA, ACA, ACCA) with 3 years PQE, or equivalent.
• Have a broad base of knowledge gained across the finance function, including strong experience in an FP&A or business partnering role.
• Demonstrate experience of driving profitability improvement by influencing senior stakeholder’s business decisions and working cross functionally.
• Demonstrate strong experience of building relationships built on mutual trust with board level stakeholders.
• Demonstrate very high proficiency in financial modelling.
• Have experience of creating B2B pricing proposals.
• Demonstrate working knowledge and practical experience of costing.
• Have experience working in a cross functional project environment.
• Preferably have knowledge of the Microsoft Power apps.
• Preferably have experience of presenting to senior stakeholder or board level meetings.

Your Team

Our Finance and Procurement team are key to strategic decision making, providing key management information, data and analysis to ensure our business runs smoothly and that we comply with all our statutory and regulatory obligations. To do this effectively, these teams take responsibility for billing, payments, credit control, purchasing, client accounting, commercial business partnering, reporting, sourcing, buying and more.