Job Description

Purpose:

To lead the financial planning and analysis for central business functions, ensuring cohesive budgeting, forecasting, and performance reporting.

Responsible to:

Head of Finance Europe

In this role you will be responsible for the following:

Supporting the improvement of company performance

by:

+ Partnering with functional leads (e.g. People & Culture, IT, Finance, Commercial, and Executive members), providing constructive challenge on monthly performance and forecast outlook to drive returns on spend.
+ Providing insights and scenario modelling to inform business actions, particularly pricing and promotional investment decisions.
+ Reviewing and challenging the returns from central spend areas, conducting post-implementation reviews to measure project success and capture lessons learned.
+ Collaborating with stakeholders on bonus scheme creation and calculation, streamlining processes, and increasing visibility of key metrics.
+ Updating key reports required by the business to support strategic decisions (e.g. committed spend, capex investments).

Owning the central function spend areas

, including:

+ Leading monthly reviews, identifying and communicating trends (historical and forecasted), and suggesting implications, actions, and strategic impacts.
+ Ensuring robust financial control through master cost schedules, accurately tracking goods and services against contracts.
+ Driving continuous improvement of reporting and closing processes, enhancing accuracy and effectiveness through variance and trend analysis, exception reporting, and feedback to Finance Operations.
+ Managing the annual budgeting and monthly forecast cycles for central functions, ensuring alignment with platform evolution and benchmarking against best-in-class businesses.
+ Leading decision modelling for capex requests, including ROI assessment, spend tracking, and post-implementation reviews.
+ Managing the central overheads recharge process and proposing allocation logic.
+ Contributing to quarterly board reporting relating to central overheads.
+ Owning month-end processes such as payroll and FTE reviews, recharges, transaction coding, and variance analysis.

Supporting the FP&A team with wider change programmes and improvements

, including:

+ Delivering routine reporting requirements through monthly and quarterly cycles, ensuring outputs meet investor-grade quality.
+ Posting for monthly close processes including cost of acquisition, central accruals, and coding reviews, ensuring compliance with accounting standards.
+ Updating reports required by the business to support strategic decision-making.

In this role you will need the following:

Knowledge, Skills, and Qualifications

+ Enthusiastic and positive approach with the ability to identify key takeaways and patterns from detailed data.
+ Strong attention to detail and ability to learn new processes, systems, and tasks quickly.
+ Resilience to short and moving deadlines, with the ability to manage multiple priorities.
+ Ability to build high-quality, accurate financial models accessible to a range of stakeholders.
+ Strong analytical skills to assess variables and scenarios that determine decision success.
+ Commercial insight and communication skills with confidence to challenge others to drive performance improvement.
+ Strong partnering skills with the ability to influence senior stakeholders cross-functionally.
+ Excellent system and modelling skills (IBM Planning Analytics (TM1), Excel, PowerBI, business modelling tools, and related systems).

Experience

+ Qualified accountant (CIMA or ACA preferred).
+ Hospitality sector experience (desirable).
+ Experience in creating and running processes and reports.
+ Proven use of business intelligence and accounting systems.
+ Strong problem-solving ability and capability to find causality in numbers.