Capability Teams Finance Business Partner

The Capability Finance Business Partner is pivotal in driving financial performance and strategic decision-making within the Capability  teams, currently including Marketing Intelligence and Creative activity . This role combines strong financial skills with a proactive business partnering approach to deliver accurate and insightful reporting, analysis, and forecasting. By collaborating closely with Capability Leadership and local market leads, the Finance Business Partner will ensure that financial information is effectively leveraged to achieve business objectives.

Financial Reporting

• Analysis and Insights: Deliver insightful financial analysis that clearly identifies key drivers of performance, potential risks, and opportunities for improvement.
• Budgeting and Forecasting: Develop and maintain accurate financial budgets and forecasts that align with the overall business strategy, being clear around logic and assumptions used, and facilitating effective resource allocation.
• Accurate Reporting: Deliver accurate month-end reports consistently on time, ensuring stakeholders have reliable financial information and insights  for decision-making.
• Performance Tracking: Closely monitor and analyse client and solution contribution margins, identifying key performance drivers and highlighting high-performing growth and potential optimisation areas.
• Revenue Recognition: Reconcile Capability-managed revenue with monthly management accounts and support local markets on revenue recognition methodologies.
• Continuous Improvement: Improve financial reporting through visualisations, dashboards, and actionable insights.

Business Partnering

• Collaboration: Partner with Capability Team Leadership and local market leads to drive actionable financial insights and achieve strategic business objectives.
• Data backed insights: Using the data, and the metrics that are driving the fluctuations and trends in performance to support the leadership make sensible resource and operational decisions.
• KPIs: Adopt, monitor, and report on key Capability performance indicators (KPIs) aligned with the business strategy (effective hourly rate, billability, productivity, and profitability).
• Communication: Communicate financial reporting and insights clearly, concisely, and effectively to both financial and non-financial stakeholders.

Structure and Processes

• Structure: Partner with the Finance shared services team to ensure the structure of the finance back-end supports the business requirements of the delivery teams and capabilities, and is consistent across the business.
• Recharges: Implement and maintain an effective recharge model that ensures full recovery of Capability team costs and is simple to understand. 
• Processes: Adopt robust, automated processes to drive efficiency across intercompany billings and other financial activities.
• Technology & Automation: Leverage financial tools and technologies to automate processes, improve accuracy, and enhance reporting capabilities.

Strategic Planning & Forecasting

• Regional Alignment: Partner with the Chief Delivery Officer, Capability Leads, and Regional Finance Business Partners to align Capability team capacity with regional, in-market activity levels.
• Workforce Optimization: Drive cost and resource planning that reflects the unique needs of Creative and MI talent. You will ensure the workforce template in Planful is accurate and mirrors the Regional GP forecast.
• Scalability Modeling: Develop financial scenarios that account for the mix of permanent staff and freelance "creative" resources to maintain agility and optimise utilisation

Commercial Framework & Recovery

• Accurate Recharges: Periodically refine and update the methodology for calculating cost recovery from the regions, ensuring rates are accurate and consistency exists across teams
• Value-Based Pricing: Support the MI and Creative capability teams to refine our pricing methodologies, ensuring we move beyond simple cost-plus to reflect the value delivered by the Marketing Intelligence and Creative output.
• Intercompany: Agree and communicate all recharges with Regions to ensure there is zero "mismatch" across the Group.

Operational Excellence & Reporting

• Month-End Leadership: Own the review of the month-end close process that is managed by the Cape Town Finance Shared Services team, ensuring speed and precision.  Responsible for driving all reporting to the Group which includes flash, actual, budget and forecast cycles.
• Insightful Variance Analysis: Instead of just reporting actuals vs. budget, you will prepare the monthly MGR template for the Exco/Group Finance with a focus on explaining the drivers to these variances.
• Utilization & Productivity: Lead the analysis on utilization and billability. Host collaboration meetings with key delivery teams to discuss trends and key actions to address any risks, resource allocation and KPI remediation.

Ad-hoc Advisory

• Strategic Projects: Provide financial support to the Chief Delivery Officer and Capability Leads on ad-hoc projects.

Qualifications and Skills:

• Education: Bachelor's degree in Accounting, Finance, or related field and professional accounting qualification (e.g. CA or CIMA/ACCA) is preferable but not required.
• Experience:
  • Proven track record in a finance business partnering role
  • Experience in financial analysis, budgeting, forecasting, and reporting.
  • Proven ability to build relationships and collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams in an international environment.
  • Experience with financial systems and tools.
  • Experience within an international environment and understanding the impact of  multiple currencies. 
  • Understanding the application of transfer pricing methodologies.
• Skills:
  • Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
  • Strong interpersonal skills with the ability to build rapport and influence others.
  • Ability to work independently and as part of a team.
  • Proactive and results-oriented approach.

Incubeta Company Values:

• Earn Trust: Focused on maintaining and increasing customer focus, works with the customer in mind earning trust along each step with clients and colleagues
• Help Others Succeed: Makes an active contribution to a joint result (organizational target) or to resolving problems or conflicts. Think in terms of possibilities. Is able to solve issues and problems in a timely and effective manner, working as a team.
• Dare to Lead: Is willing to improve individual performance and stimulate others to act accordingly. Setting the standard and example. Being solution driven.
• Exceed Expectations: Carries out tasks without help from others; takes command of problem situations and aims to achieve more than the basic requirements. Goes above and beyond the basic expectations of the role and the business.

Equal Opportunity Employer: Incubeta is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.