Vickerstock are working in partnership with a leading food manufacturing business to recruit a Cost Accountant for their growing finance team.
This is an excellent opportunity for a commercially minded finance professional to play a key role in driving profitability, operational performance, and financial control across a fast-paced manufacturing environment. Working closely with Operations, Procurement, Commercial and Supply Chain teams, you will provide valuable financial insight, support decision-making, and help identify opportunities to improve efficiencies and margins throughout the business.
The Role
Reporting to the Finance Manager, you will take ownership of product costing, manufacturing performance analysis, inventory reporting, and financial support for operational decision-making. The successful candidate will act as a key business partner across the site, ensuring robust financial information is available to support both strategic and day-to-day decisions.
Key Responsibilities
- Maintain and develop accurate product costings, recipes/BOMs and packaging cost structures across the product portfolio.
- Ensure standard costs remain up to date, reflecting current raw material prices, labour costs, production yields and overhead allocations.
- Analyse product and customer profitability, identifying key margin drivers and providing recommendations to improve performance.
- Support commercial pricing decisions through detailed costing models, scenario planning and sensitivity analysis.
- Partner with NPD and Commercial teams to provide costings for new product launches, product changes and post-implementation reviews.
- Produce and analyse manufacturing variance reports, including material usage, purchase price variances, labour efficiency, yield performance, waste and overhead absorption.
- Work closely with site leadership and operational teams to understand performance trends and identify opportunities for continuous improvement.
- Support the monitoring and reporting of key manufacturing KPIs including yield, waste, efficiency and giveaway.
- Track cost-saving initiatives and improvement projects, providing analysis and reporting on realised benefits and profitability improvements.
- Support month-end processes relating to inventory, work-in-progress, finished goods and cost of sales.
- Assist with stocktakes and cycle count programmes, including valuation, reconciliation and investigation of variances.
- Ensure robust controls are maintained around inventory valuation, accruals and financial cut-off procedures.
- Prepare accurate and timely financial information to support monthly management accounts and periodic reporting requirements.
- Assist with year-end audit processes and respond to audit queries as required.
- Maintain costing and inventory data within ERP systems, ensuring accuracy across BOMs, routings, labour standards, material pricing and overhead rates.
- Collaborate with Procurement and Supply Chain teams to ensure supplier pricing updates, rebates and credits are reflected accurately.
- Support continuous improvement of financial controls, master data governance and reporting processes.
- Prepare meaningful management information and reporting packs for key stakeholders across the business.
- Contribute to annual budgeting and quarterly forecasting activities.
- Support business cases, grant applications and investment proposals where required.
The Person
- Qualified or part-qualified accountant (ACA/ACCA/CIMA) or equivalent relevant experience
- Strong knowledge of standard costing, variance analysis, and inventory accounting
- Previous experience in food manufacturing is desirable
- Advanced Excel skills; comfortable working with ERP systems and large data-sets
To be considered for this vacancy, please apply to the link provided with an up to date CV.
Skills:
accountancy cima acca cost accountant
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