Head of Finance

surrey - 3 days office, 2 from home - permanent - an established technology services business rebuilding its finance function around ai and automation

are you a financial controller or head of finance who wants to rebuild a function rather than inherit one? Do you want a job where the automation agenda is yours to own, not something that lands on you from above?

we do group are working with a long-established it managed services provider in guildford. Stable client base, strong reputation, genuinely nice people. New investment came in earlier this year with a clear plan: use ai and automation to modernise the way the business runs, starting with its own back office, and finance is at the front of that queue.

the current head of finance is moving on in the autumn. The team does a good job, but a lot of the work is still manual and the tooling hasn't kept pace. This is the most senior full-time finance role in the business, working alongside a fractional cfo and a team of in-house ai engineers who are building the platform.

• a qualified accountant, five years+ pqe, who has run a finance function end to end and wants the next step in scope rather than the next rung on a ladder
• real evidence of using automation, systems or ai to strip manual work out of finance processes, and the confidence to talk about what worked and what didn't
• commercial instinct and a voice. Expectation to speak up in the leadership team

• take full ownership of the finance function day to day, including month-end, reporting, controls and compliance
• lead the redesign of the finance operating model, cutting manual processing, reconciliation and error correction out of the team's week
• work directly with the in-house ai engineering team to identify, prioritise and roll out the tooling that changes how finance runs
• partner with the fractional cfo, turning financial strategy into operational delivery and feeding commercial insight back the other way
• own financial planning, forecasting and management reporting for the leadership team
• build pricing governance, margin control and client profitability reporting alongside the technical leadership
• provide the financial input into new products, services and larger deals before they're signed, not after
• own statutory and regulatory compliance including audit, corporation tax, vat and payroll, and act as the main contact for auditors and external advisers
• work across departments to find the upstream causes of rework and error, then fix the process rather than the symptom
• lead, coach and support an established finance team through a period of real change
• sit as a full member of the leadership team, contributing to strategy, growth planning and investment decisions
• build the reporting and forecasting the investors need as the group grows

• effective communicator, written and verbal
• good working knowledge of ms excel
• comfortable with ambiguity. Priorities will move and plenty is still being worked out. You need to be someone who gets on with it rather than waits for clarity
• able to switch styles. Steady and supportive with your team, sharper and quicker in the room with investors

• guildford - three days in the office and two from home
• seat on the leadership team from day one
• start date flexible for the right person, with scope for a handover from the outgoing head of finance