Financial Analyst

Provide financial planning, analysis, reporting and modelling support.

The role will support the management reporting, preparation of budgets, forecasts, , financial models, service costing, variance analysis and business cases, ensuring accurate and timely financial information is available for management decision-making.

The position will work closely with Finance, Commercial, Operations, and Shared Services to collect, validate and analyse financial and operational information.

The role is primarily an analytical and execution-focused finance role, supporting Business Partnering who owns the overall business partnering, commercial finance and senior stakeholder engagement agenda.

• Prepare monthly management reporting and financial analysis.
• Maintain revenue, cost and profitability schedules.
• Prepare monthly variance analysis and supporting commentary.
• Track key operational and financial KPIs.
• Develop reporting by service/product group.
• Link operational metrics such as services, kilometres, tonnes and ton-kilometres to financial performance.
• Ensure reporting data is complete, accurate and reconciled to the underlying financial information.
• Maintain recurring MIS templates and improve reporting efficiency.

• Support the annual ERF budgeting and forecasting process.
• Collect and consolidate departmental budget inputs.
• Maintain detailed budget working files and financial models.
• Prepare budget versus actual and forecast versus actual analysis.
• Update monthly forecasts based on latest operational and commercial assumptions.
• Maintain the ERF 5-year financial plan and supporting schedules.
• Track changes in volumes, train paths, manpower, fleet, fuel, maintenance, terminal and other operating assumptions.
• Follow up with departments for outstanding budget and forecast inputs.
• Develop and maintain Excel-based financial models.
• Support financial modelling for new services, commercial proposals and operational changes.
• Prepare scenario and sensitivity analysis.
• Analyse revenue, direct costs, contribution margin and operating costs.
• Maintain costing models for different services and routes.
• Support investment and business-case analysis.
• Ensure models are structured, transparent and easy to update.

• Support the Finance Business Partner with pricing and commercial analysis.
• Prepare service-level cost calculations and profitability analysis.
• Analyse customer, product, route and service profitability.
• Prepare financial schedules and supporting analysis for commercial proposals.
• Maintain pricing and costing databases/models.

• Monitor actual costs against budget and forecast.
• Analyse key cost drivers including:
• Fuel
• Fleet maintenance
• Terminal costs
• Trucking
• Manpower
• Utilities
• Shared services
• Other operating costs
• Investigate material variances and identify underlying drivers.
• Support monthly accrual-to-actual analysis.
• Track recurring and one-off cost movements.
• Assist with cost allocation and cost-centre analysis.
• Extract and consolidate financial and operational data from relevant systems and reports.
• Perform data validation and reconciliation.
• Maintain financial databases and supporting schedules.
• Improve the quality and consistency of financial data used for reporting and planning.
• Develop automated Excel reporting where practical.
• Support the migration of recurring Excel reporting into Power BI or other BI platforms.

• Prepare financial schedules for business cases under the direction of the Finance Business Partner.
• Calculate revenue, cost, margin, cash flow, ROI, IRR and payback where applicable.
• Perform sensitivity analysis on key assumptions.
• Maintain supporting documentation and assumptions.
• Provide clear analytical outputs for management presentations and decision papers.

• Support analysis of intercompany charges and recharges.
• Maintain supporting calculations for shared-service and corporate allocations.
• Coordinate with SSC to obtain actuals, accruals, invoicing and collection information.
• Reconcile financial information between operational, commercial and accounting records.
• Track outstanding financial information and follow up with relevant stakeholders.

• Identify opportunities to automate recurring finance processes.
• Improve Excel models, reporting templates and data structures.
• Standardise recurring financial analysis and reporting.
• Reduce manual reporting and duplication of work.
• Support development of…