The team

Central to our success as a Firm are of course our talented lawyers, but they couldn't achieve their results without the ongoing support from our Finance Team who have an essential role to play in growing the business and maintaining our financial performance.  Our Business Planning & Analysis (BP&A) Team, reporting into the CFO play a critical role; they maintain the firm's accounts, set and manage budgets and analyse and interpret financial data that assists with commercial, Partner and Board decision making.

The role

As a Management Accountant in the BP&A team, you will be responsible for assisting in the delivery of the following:

• Production of the monthly management accounts to Partners and the Board
• Monthly performance reporting across the firm by business group and team against budget and forecasts with appropriate commentary
• Daily performance reporting to Partners and Business Directors
• Annual budgeting and half year reforecasting across revenues and expenses
• Business partnering with team leaders to help them understand their team's financial performance and investigating and resolving any financial queries in a timely manner
• Development of training materials and delivery of training sessions to fee earners across the firm on how to use financial tools and interpret financial data
• Management of a centralised mailbox fielding queries from across the business on a daily basis, often time sensitive and business critical
• Project development, creating efficiencies in existing financial processes and assessing new tools available.
• Supporting and contributing towards successful annual audits
• Contributions to sector surveys and benchmarking reporting

We are moving our reporting from manual excel based reports to the online platform Qlik and we are looking for individuals who are interested in developing reporting, generating visualisations, and who are keen to work towards creating more meaningful and dynamic reporting for our business.

What are we looking for?

To be successful in this role you will need to be a qualified accountant (CIMA/ACCA/ACA). The ideal candidate will be a team player who is proactive, efficient, and keen to take ownership of tasks and has the following skills and experience:

• Experience working in a similar role, ideally in the legal sector, although not essential.
• Strong excel skills and the ability to create new financial models and use/adapt existing models.

• The ability to deliver a complete solution to the business and be able to work in the detail but also see the bigger picture and communicate that to Partners and fee earners.

• The ability to follow directions well but also use initiative to improve processes and drive efficiencies.

• An organised approach to work is essential to allow the management of conflicting deadlines and priorities.
• Strong interpersonal and communication skills (written and oral), with experience communicating to a range of stakeholders.

• The ability to collaborate across the business especially with IT and the financial systems team as we look to develop our reporting online.

• Experience of using Aderant or a similar general ledger to post journals, and complete month end processes.
• Experience of using Qlik or Power BI to deliver reports to the business in an interesting, interactive, dynamic way.
• The energy and enthusiasm to manage new initiatives, challenge the norm and strive towards excellence and innovation.

What makes it great to work here?

We continually work hard to create an open culture that sets us apart from other firms. Our culture gives us much more of a human feel, emphasising that we're more than just suits!

As signatories to the Mindful Business Charter, it's important to us that our people are able to maintain healthy and happy lives, both in and out of work. We have a number of resources and initiatives designed to support health and wellbeing and we're very happy to talk flexible working, full-time or part-time working patterns.

Through our DEI initiatives we create an environment in which difference is valued. We have an Diversity Equity & Inclusion Group, led by our Board Sponsor, which works with our colleague networks (we currently have firm supported networks for race, ethnicity, and cultural heritage, LGBTQ+, disabilities, families, and women's career development and we're in constant dialogue with our people about how we expand our networks to better support everybody). Find out more about DEI at WBD here. We encourage applicants from all social backgrounds, ethnicities, disabilities, gender identities and sexual orientations.

We are committed to ensuring our recruitment process is inclusive and accessible to all. If you have a disability or long term condition and need us to make any adjustments to give you the best possible recruitment process, please let us know by contacting the recruiter on the right hand side of this page.

We are an in-house recruitment team and will always aim to fill our roles directly in the first instance. If you're an agency, please click here for ways that you can work with us.