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HMRC is made up of Business Groups, which work independently towards one common goal. Our role sits within HMRC’s Chief Digital & Information Office (CDIO) Group, which delivers in-house solutions for a broad range of technical and operational services. CDIO is HMRC’s Digital, Data and Information Technology (IT) function, ensuring HMRC has the IT systems and processes to run and deliver its services.

Sitting in the Financial Management division within CDIO’s Finance Directorate, Finance Business Partners play a key role in delivering exceptional financial services to CDIO leaders, influencing decision-making and positive outcomes through strong financial management.

This role is an exciting opportunity for a highly motivated and proactive finance professional, who enjoys operating and leading in a dynamic, challenging and evolving business environment.

Job description

Finance Business Partnering is key to the government finance vision of putting finance at the heart of decision making. Great Finance Business Partners drive the agenda, they do not just keep score. They aspire to become a truly trusted partner to the business, the ‘go-to’ for a wide variety of colleagues and stakeholders for expert advice and decision-making support.

Finance Business Partners (FBPs) in CDIO build strong relationships to influence stakeholders and enable effective financial management in collaboration with their Management Accountant colleagues. These relationships enable FBPs to facilitate constructive challenge of the business area they partner with and act as a bridge into other areas of finance.

The role of an FBP requires strong communication skills as well as strategic planning, reporting and analysis skills. Key activities performed by FBPs include:

• facilitating and challenging long-term planning, budgeting, and forecasting
• analysis and communication of financial data and reports
• supporting and challenging investment appraisals and business cases
• being a critical friend and independent advisor to the business
• advising on commercial aspects and enabling the business to find solutions to complex business issues
• support and advice to enable delivery of business objectives.

Working collaboratively together

Finance Business Partners and Management Accountants have different but complementary, mutually beneficial roles and work together in equal partnership, with each using the outputs of the other to add value for the rest of the finance function and for the wider business.

Finance Business Partnering

• delivering financial decision support
• providing advice on strategic outcomes
• integrating finance with decision making
• embedding governance assurance and controls
• acting as a critical friend

Management Accounting

• recognised and respected for subject matter expertise
• providing systems management and ledger control
• creating value adding intelligent analytics
• delivering in-year financial planning and budgeting
• telling the story through insightful management reporting

Person specification

• Highlights areas of potential conflict between stakeholders and manages them accordingly. A confident communicator, comfortable with challenging senior business leaders.
• Ability to influence at all levels of the business hierarchy, using logical persuasion and consensus building within groups. Able to remain focused on the overall business strategic vision during negotiation, knowing when to compromise and when to challenge for the benefit of the business.
• Highly visible across their area as the primary point of contact for financial advice - the 'face' of Finance. Understands the vision for the business and confidently leads others to realise the vision.
• Leadership, and the ability to motivate and develop a diverse finance team and promote excellence. Highly proficient in using and interpreting data and analytics to support analysis and decision making, identifying gaps in data, and reporting and working with Financial Systems colleagues to develop additional reporting as required.

Essential Criteria 

• Excellent interpersonal skills and ability to build and maintain strong working relationships with stakeholders. 
• Strong leadership and line management skills, with the ability to develop and motivate people both from own line management chain and across the wider team. 
• Strong analytical skills with the ability to translate financial data into meaningful insight to support decision making. 
• Proven experience (at least 3 years) within a similar role and experience of working in a large and complex organisation. 
• Confident communicator, comfortable with robustly challenging senior business leaders and decision-makers. 
• Ability to work in a culture of change, to think strategically and work comfortably with risk. 
• Full or nearing completion of CCAB qualification (incl. CIMA, ACCA, CIPFA, ACA) or willing to study towards being fully qualified within 2 years of taking up the role.

Desirable Criteria 

• CCAB fully qualified accountant (includes CIMA, ACCA CIPFA, ACA or equivalent).  
• Previous experience of working within or supporting an IT organisation from a finance perspective. 
• Previous experience of working within a public sector or not-for-profit organisation's finance team.