Rutherford Cross is delighted to be retained by the iconic Highland Spring to appoint a Financial Reporting & Controls Manager. This is a newly created role to further bolster the finance team.

This is an exciting opportunity for an experience finance professional to lead the financial, regulatory, and statutory reporting and controls activity for the Group companies in Highland Spring. Working with internal and external stakeholder to ensure the delivery of accurate and timely reporting and statutory requirements.

You must be able to work at pace across multiple functions and inspire confidence with the senior leadership team with the quality and insightfulness of your outputs. You will look at business challenges with an external and internal lens ensuring the best positions for the organisation based on current. This role will offer remote working initially with a blended approach likely going forward. The office premises are based in the idyllic village of Blackford at the foot of the Ochils and the source of our water.

Key responsibilities:

• Ensure that the Business has in place and adheres to adequate and robust Financial, Reporting and Operational controls.
• Preparation and review of the monthly P&L and Balance Sheet ensuring that these are accurate and comply to all relevant standards.
• Cash flow and Balance Sheet forecasting across multiple revenue flows and funding structures.
• Completion of all statutory Group reporting requirements.
• Develop simple, intuitive outputs from analytics, create concise, impactful presentations to demonstrate learnings to senior leadership and functional heads of department.
• Engage with all functions across the organisation to ensure alignment and use findings to challenge existing paradigms and ways of working.
• Build repeatable analytics models for use in key strategic support & insight reviewing product, customer, site and market, profitability and strategic objectives.
• Daily, weekly and monthly performance reporting and supporting analysis with fact-based recommendations.
• Provide Executive level analysis and summary
• Support and co-ordinate the Finance team through budgeting & forecasting cycles.
• Support and drive projects and process improvement initiatives linked to the financial reporting and control environments of the organisation.
• Ensuring all statutory financial information and analysis is prepared and submitted in a timely manner (e.g. VAT, ONS, PAYE/NIC).
• Leading the annual audit process with external audit, including annual stock counts across multiple sites.
• Reporting and accounting as per regulatory and legal requirements including taxation, annual reports and accounts.
• Support the management of the relationship with our external banking partner, ensuring banking covenant compliance and funding availability.
• Provide financial analysis and interpretation around key business drivers and performance indicators.
• Support the Head of Finance and the Finance team with the annual budgeting process, regular forecasting cycles and the 5-year planning process ensuring that these reflect the latest business projections across the full range of financial statements and reports.
• Ensure adherence to health & safety, compliance, and regulatory procedures.
• Various ad hoc duties such as Capex evaluation, evaluation of proposed customer promotions, new business evaluation.

About You

• A qualified accountant with a strong background in an FMCG environment.
• Experience with ERP/BW would be highly beneficial although not essential.
• Significant experience of preparing Financial/Statutory Accounts across group company structures.
• Ability to work under pressure and work to tight deadlines in a lean environment.
• Team leadership skills, and ability and desire to drive change & continuous improvement within a team through coaching and mentoring to develop analytical skills capability. A
• Strong communication and influencing skills at all levels in an organisation.
• A proactive approach to process and methodology improvement.
• Experience in financial reporting and strong control environments.
• Experience in project management and/or involvement in project teams.
• Excellent communication skills, verbal and written.
• Excellent analytical, interpretation, problem solving and research skills.
• Ability to support and engage people at all levels of the business.
• Excellent attention to detail and organisational skills with the ability to self-motivate.