Financial Analyst - FP&A

ABOUT THE TEAM

The Financial Performance & Reporting team at ALU is being established from the ground up. Under the leadership of the Associate Director of Financial Performance & Reporting, the team's mission is to transform financial data into strategic insights that guide institutional decision-making. This encompasses areas such as financial planning, management reporting, revenue assurance, and performance analysis.

This is a small but high-impact team, where the work has a significant impact. The systems, frameworks, and processes you help develop will directly influence how ALU understands and manages its financial performance for years to come.

The Financial Performance & Reporting team sits at the core of ALU’s finance transformation agenda, with a mandate to establish a disciplined, insight-driven approach to financial management across the institution.

Led by the Associate Director of Financial Performance & Reporting, the team is responsible for translating financial data into clear, actionable insights that support decision-making at both operational and leadership levels. This includes ownership of financial planning, management reporting, performance analysis, and the integrity of underlying financial data.

The team operates at the intersection of FP&A and financial control, working closely with the Finance Operations function to ensure that reporting is grounded in accurate, reconciled, and complete financial information. As such, the function plays a critical role in reinforcing month-end discipline, strengthening data integrity, and enabling ALU’s “report once” reporting framework.

This role reports directly to the Senior FP&A and ultimately to the Associate Director of Financial Performance & Reporting. As part of a small, high-impact team, you will contribute to building the systems, processes, and standards that will define how ALU manages and understands its financial performance going forward.

ROLE RESPONSIBILITIES

1. COGS Analysis & Management

• Own the monthly COGS reporting cycle: extract, reconcile, and analyze all direct programme costs against budget, tracking variances by cost category, programme, and campus.
• Maintain the COGS master schedule, ensuring all direct costs, faculty fees, programme delivery costs, student-facing expenses, and contracted services are correctly coded, allocated, and reconciled to the Net Suite ledger.
• Prepare monthly COGS variance commentary for review by the Associate Director, highlighting key drivers, timing differences, and cost risks.
• Monitor cost per student and cost per programme metrics, flagging anomalies and trends for management attention.
• Drive identification of cost optimisation opportunities across programmes.
• Maintain the overhead tracker across all departments: HR, Technology, Finance, Facilities, Marketing, and Administration.
• Produce monthly departmental overhead reports with budget vs actuals, variance analysis, and narrative summaries for departmental leads and senior management.
• Reconcile overhead expenditure to Net Suite ledger entries monthly; identify and investigate mispostings, timing differences, and unbudgeted spend.
• Track committed spend and accruals to ensure completeness of the monthly overhead picture; maintain the accruals schedule.
• Challenge departmental spend against approved budgets and enforce cost discipline through proactive engagement with budget owners.

3. Audit support & Month-end close

• Prepare and maintain all core supporting schedules for the monthly and year-end close: prepayments, accruals, fixed assets, depreciation, and capitalized costs.
• Ensure all schedules are fully reconciled to the Net Suite trial balance and delivered to the Finance Operations Director within the agreed close timeline (by close +5).
• Maintain the fixed asset register: additions, disposals, depreciation runs, and year-end reconciliation.
• Support the Finance Operations Director in providing audit-ready schedules during statutory and donor audits.
• Proactively identify schedule discrepancies and reconcile items; investigate and resolve with the Finance Operations team.

4. Budgeting & Forecasting Support (Cost focus)

• Support the…