Financial Controller

Forge Talent are partnering with a high-growth, PE-backed organisation to appoint a Commercial Financial Controller.

This isn’t a role for someone who just wants to report the numbers, we need someone who can understand them, challenge them and use them to drive performance.

Working closely with senior operational leadership, you’ll have real influence across profitability, cash, margins, commercial decision-making and the continued growth of the business.

Key Responsibilities:

• Take full ownership of the monthly management accounts process, ensuring accurate, insightful and timely reporting that gives leadership a clear view of business performance.
• Work closely with senior operational leaders as a genuine commercial partner, providing challenge, improving financial understanding and helping translate performance data into clear actions.
• Get properly under the skin of the commercial drivers of the business, particularly revenue, pricing, margins, customer and service-line profitability, identifying opportunities to improve performance.
• Lead the annual budgeting process alongside regular forecasting and reforecasting, ensuring the business has a robust and forward-looking view of financial performance.
• Maintain a strong focus on cash generation and working capital, improving visibility, accountability and performance across cash conversion, WIP and debt.
• Develop and embed meaningful operational and financial KPIs across areas including WIP, utilisation, productivity, margins and profitability, ensuring management information drives decisions rather than simply reports what has already happened.
• Lead, manage and develop the management accounts team, creating clear accountability, raising standards and building capability as the finance function continues to evolve.
• Continuously improve financial processes, controls and reporting, creating a finance function that is increasingly efficient, scalable and able to support the growth of the wider business.
• Play a key role across systems improvement, automation and wider finance transformation, identifying opportunities to remove manual processes and improve the quality, speed and accessibility of financial information.
• Act as a key finance contact throughout the external audit process, ensuring information is accurate, well controlled and delivered within agreed timelines.
• Support the broader finance and commercial agenda as the business continues to scale under PE ownership, bringing greater rigor, insight and pace while helping build a finance function capable of supporting the next stage of growth.