Finance Director job description

Finance & accounting — Finance Director
Sets financial strategy, budgets and funding across the company.

REQUIRED SKILLS
Core Accounting
- Journal Entries and Accruals — You can set the journal approval rules and thresholds for the team, and fix the recurring causes of late or wrong entries.
- Account Reconciliation — You can set the reconciliation standard for every balance sheet account, with owners, deadlines and thresholds, and make sure it holds under audit.
- Accounts Payable Processing — You can design the purchase-to-pay controls and approval limits for the organization, and balance supplier relationships against cash timing.
- Accounts Receivable and Collections — You can set credit and collections policy for the team, and cut the time it takes to turn invoices into cash.
- Fixed Asset and Depreciation Accounting — You can write the capitalization and depreciation policy, and account for leases, projects and impairments under the accounting standards that apply.

Close & Reporting
- Month-End Close Management — You can set the close timetable and standard for the whole organization and answer for the reported numbers being right.
- Financial Statement Preparation — You can own what the organization reports to its board, lenders, investors and regulators, and decide how its results are presented.
- GAAP and IFRS Application — You can answer for the organization's compliance with the standards it reports under, and advise leadership on the reporting effect of major deals before they are signed.
- Revenue Recognition — You can own revenue reporting for the organization, and make sure pricing and contract strategy take its accounting into account.
- Consolidation and Intercompany Accounting — You can own group reporting, and advise on how acquisitions, disposals and new entities change the group structure and its accounts.

Controls & Audit
- Financial Controls and Segregation of Duties — You can decide how much financial risk the organization accepts, and report on the state of its controls to the board or audit committee.
- Audit Readiness and Auditor Liaison — You can manage the relationship with the external auditors and audit committee, and decide how the organization responds to significant findings.
- ERP and General Ledger Administration — You can lead an ERP upgrade, module rollout or system migration, and keep the books complete and controlled through it.
- Chart of Accounts Design — You can redesign the chart of accounts and reporting dimensions so managers get the reports they need without manual rework.

Tax & Treasury
- Sales Tax and VAT Compliance — You can own indirect tax compliance across several jurisdictions, work with tax advisers, and set up the system tax rules correctly.
- Corporate Tax Provision and Filing Support — You can own the tax provision including deferred tax, manage the relationship with tax advisers, and answer tax queries from auditors.
- Cash Flow Forecasting and Treasury — You can set treasury policy and plan the organization's funding, including when and how it raises debt or equity.

Planning & Analysis
- Annual Budget Building — You can set the budget the board approves and the tradeoffs behind it, and link it to the organization's strategy.
- Rolling Forecasts and Reforecasting — You can decide how the organization forecasts, and use the forecast to steer spending and hiring through the year.
- Budget Variance Analysis — You can hold leadership to the plan with variance analysis, and decide when a variance means the plan itself must change.
- Financial Modeling in Excel — You can review others' models for errors and fragile logic, and set the modeling standards for the team.
- Finance Business Partnering — You can shape the organization's major decisions as a member of its leadership, making sure the financial consequences are understood before they are taken.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can set the everyday habits for how work is organized and followed up across the organization, and teams you do not lead adopt the routines you introduce.
- Planning & Estimation — You can forecast work and staffing quarters ahead, and the way you estimate becomes what the wider organization plans against.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can take on the outcomes the organization is most exposed on, and other leaders send problems with no owner to you by default.
- Quality Focus — You can raise the quality bar across the organization by building the tools and habits that make the careful way the easy way.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can crack problems the organization has repeatedly failed to solve, and your approach becomes how others tackle that whole kind of problem.
- Domain Expertise — You can influence how the field is practiced beyond this organization, and your expertise settles questions that have stood open for years.
- Continuous Learning — You can set what the organization invests its learning time in, and the material and practice you create outlive your involvement.

Communication
- Communication — You can set how the organization communicates, and the forums and norms you create clearly improve how information travels through it.
- Collaboration — You can remove the barriers that stop teams working together, and how the organization collaborates changes because of what you built.
- Writing & Documentation — You can set the writing standard the organization works to, and documents you wrote are still in use long after you have moved on.
- Stakeholder Management — You can represent the organization in its most important relationships and set how it engages with everyone who depends on it.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can set direction for the whole organization, make hard calls under real uncertainty, and carry the decisions nobody else wants to own.
- Mentoring — You can shape how the organization grows its people, and those you developed are themselves named by others as strong in their field.
- Strategic Thinking — You can shape the organization's strategy, and the bets you argued for are visible in where it ended up.

REQUIRED CERTIFICATIONS
- Certified Public Accountant (CPA) (required from Financial Controller)