Finance Manager (maternity cover) in Farnborough

Vision FR is delighted to be working with a great creative/events agency to support their search for a Finance Manager to cover their business during a period of maternity leave. You’ll look after all aspects of a finance department, including running a small team. You’ll provide commercial analysis, month and year-end reporting and business partnering, managing multiple jobs day-to-day and using your initiative to make improvements to enable business growth.

Key responsibilities:

• Support the Finance and Commercial Director by managing day-to-day finance activities and looking after a small finance team.
• Manage the team and oversee all administrative tasks including expenses, credit cards and the sales and purchase ledgers from posting invoices through to making payments.
• Ownership of month and year end: overheads, prepayments, accruals, posting journals, COS (incl. revenue recognition), reconciling & reporting.
• Prepare complete management accounts including full P&L and Balance Sheet including Revenue Recognition of multiple projects.
• Business Partner to the Project & Client Services teams, demonstrating commercial awareness and providing relevant analysis and feedback.
• Proactively help set projects up for success from a commercial perspective.
• Guide Junior Project Accountant to ensure timely and accurate reconciliations, assessment and reporting on projects from a financial perspective throughout their full lifecycle, ensuring positive cash positions, accuracy of transactions in the systems from setting up and financials through to time bookings and billings.
• Look to improve systems and processes to ensure operations are efficient, challenging current practices to be better where appropriate.
• Refine & implement improved reporting where appropriate/required. Circulate regular reports and contribute to monthly board packs to improve awareness of financial performance.
• Contribute to filing requirements at year end including statutory accounts, VAT, R&D tax credits & various other requirements throughout the year.

Qualifications, Experience & Skills:

• You’re either fully qualified or in the final stages of study with a recognised professional accountancy body (ACA / ACCA / CIMA).
• You’re able to demonstrate progressive and relevant experience, ideally with previous exposure to project accounting, team management and Creative Agency environments.
• You have great emotional intelligence, be reliable, trustworthy with excellent communication and time management skills.
• You possess outstanding work ethics, integrity and professionalism.
• You have great attention to detail, can make improvements and see your ideas through to completion.
• You have a good working knowledge of the following software packages: Sage50 Cloud Accounts (or similar), Slack, Microsoft Office, Google workspace. Procim experience would be advantageous.
• You challenge software norms, are AI literate and can help make our finance department future proof.

VisionFR is committed to encouraging equality, diversity, inclusion and eliminating unlawful discrimination within our workforce and whilst fulfilling our Clients recruitment needs.

Due to the high level of applications being received if you do not hear from us within 5 working days, please assume your application has not been successful on this occasion, usually due to other candidates having more relevant sector exposure, qualifications or required skills. We thank you for your interest.