Lead the day-to-day finance function and manage a team of five. Responsibilities include management accounts, reconciliations, budgeting, forecasting, cash flow, banking, VAT, audit, payroll oversight, billing, controls, and finance systems. The role also drives process improvement, automation, system integrations, reporting enhancements, and team training while partnering with budget holders and senior management.
Do you like making a finance function work better, not just keeping it running? This is a hands-on leadership role. You’ll run day-to-day finance, lead a team of five, and help our Finance Director overhaul how we work. In a typical month, you might sign off the management accounts, sit down with a budget owner to talk through a variance, and test a new bank feed before it goes live. We’re aiming for a faster month-end, stronger controls and better management information, and you’ll be central to getting us there.
We’re small and friendly enough that you’ll get to know everyone, and big enough to offer real influence and good career prospects.
We’re small and friendly enough that you’ll get to know everyone, and big enough to offer real influence and good career prospects.
Key Responsibilities
- Team leadership: managing and developing a finance team of five, allocating workloads, reviewing work and coaching, and acting as the escalation point for complex finance issues.
- Management reporting and commercial finance: preparing and reviewing the monthly management accounts, balance sheet reconciliations and fee earner incentive reporting. Meeting budget owners on spend, variances and forecasts, supporting the annual budget, and providing analysis and commentary to management.
- Cash, banking and treasury: managing weekly and monthly cash flow and forecasting, cash collection information, banking relationships, loans and repayments, and FX requirements and currency exposures.
- Tax, audit and payroll: preparing and submitting VAT returns, keeping tax compliance sound with external advisers, coordinating the annual audit as the auditors’ main contact, and overseeing the monthly payroll checks.
- Billing, systems and controls: supporting the team with complex billing and system issues, protecting data integrity, and maintaining and improving finance controls.
- Transformation: reviewing processes and controls to simplify, automate or strengthen them. Helping design, test and implement new systems and integrations such as bank feeds, invoice imports and Power BI. Training the team in new ways of working and documenting new processes, while keeping business-as-usual deadlines on track.
Our systems are Sage Intacct (general ledger and month-end), Equinox (practice management, time recording and billing), Excel and SharePoint.
Skills, Knowledge and Expertise
- ACA, ACCA or CIMA qualification
- Several years’ experience at Financial Controller, Finance Manager or senior Management Accountant level
- Experience managing a small finance team and leading it through change
- Strong management accounts and balance sheet experience
- VAT, audit and cash flow forecasting experience
- Experience delivering process improvement or system change in a finance function
- Strong Excel and finance systems skills
- Attention to detail and the ability to review other people’s work
- Ability to investigate and resolve complex finance issues
- Confidence dealing directly with budget holders and senior management
Nice to have
- Professional services experience, ideally in an LLP or a business of similar size and complexity
- Sage Intacct or a similar ERP system, and Power BI or similar reporting tools
- Finance system implementations, integrations or automation
- Multi-currency accounting and FX, banking facilities and loans
- Fee earner incentive schemes and payroll oversight
Benefits
We pride ourselves on being small and friendly enough for you to get to know everyone – but big enough to offer you great career prospects. At Appleyard Lees, you won’t feel like a number or just another cog in the wheel. We understand everyone is an individual and offer a friendly and supportive place to work and learn.
We also offer:
We also offer:
- 34 hour working week, Monday – Friday
- Hybrid working
- A supportive and friendly place to work and learn
- Annual salary review
- 25 days annual leave + bank holidays
- Holiday Purchase Scheme
- Salary Exchange
- Life assurance
- Healthcare Cash Plan & Wellbeing App
- Group Income Protection
- Long Service Milestones
- Social outings
- Vouchers on Christmas, birthdays and special occasions
- Charity events
About
Appleyard Lees is a leading intellectual property law firm with approximately seventy patent and trade mark attorneys and litigators across offices in Halifax, Leeds, Manchester, and Cambridge.We provide a full range of intellectual property (IP) services covering patents, trade marks, designs and copyright in the UK, Europe and worldwide. We use our technical and legal skills, and many years of experience, to identify and protect IP assets and to uncover and eliminate the risks posed by other people’s IP rights.Who we are, and what we do – but also, how we do it – makes us distinctive.Our clients include some of the world’s most exciting innovators, largest companies, and household names, with a number of clients obtaining Fortune 500, Fortune Global 2000, FTSE 100, FTSE 250, and Forbes Global 2000 status. Our clients operate across a diverse collection of industries, including chemicals, retail, consumer goods, electronics, software, bio and life sciences, pharmaceuticals, metals, and heavy industry, higher education, and hospitality, leisure, and tourism.Equality, Diversity & Inclusion Equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) has always been part of the core values of Appleyard Lees. To us, diversity is not just a box-ticking exercise, it is a core part of our firm’s values . Diversity of people means diversity of ideas and perspectives, and these allow us to be more creative and flexible as a business. We welcome the unique contribution that a diverse workforce will bring to our firm and actively encourage applications from all talented people – however your talent is packaged, whatever your background or circumstance and regardless of how you identify.
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