Senior Finance Manager - Trading

• Leadership of your team, including direct line management of Finance Managers and coaching and development of the broader team.  

• Primary outcomes of the team include: 
  • Production of weekly and monthly reporting 
  • Forecasting, budgeting and strategic planning 
  • Decision support, from tactical decisions up to large strategic projects, including financial appraisal 
  • Insight and analysis to better inform decision making 
  • Challenge and support to business functions and, where relevant, to third party suppliers 
  • Ensure the month-end is closed accurately, timely and in accordance with policies as set by Financial Reporting (P&L and balance sheet) 

• Partner directly (and indirectly via the team) the Exec and Dunelm Leadership Team members in the functions you support – acting as ‘critical friend’ 

• Direct ownership, leadership and presentation of regular or ad hoc outputs and meetings. E.g. Weekly Trade, Steering Groups for focus areas, acting as Finance Lead 

• Identifying business opportunities or risks and influencing stakeholders to take action. Questioning the status quo and coming up with improvement ideas.   

• Constantly re-review the prioritisation of your team’s workload, looking for better ways to do things and being brave in stopping activities.  

Specifics for Trading Finance

• End to end ownership of sales, margin and stock from a finance partnering perspective, from planning through to performance 

• Ownership of budgeting and forecasting cycles (specifically sales and margin planning, plus channel-based sales driver expectations like traffic, levers etc), across commercial categories and sales channels – ensuring alignment across target setting and wider business planning 

• Ownership of weekly Trade content and trading story, helping the business to understand performance and areas of focus. Follow up of ad-hoc Trade actions that support diagnosis of business trading performance.  

• Partnering of Exec and Leadership Team stakeholders to achieve targets and identify areas of opportunity/optimisation (through eventing, margin investment, clearance decisioning etc); specific critical challenge on strategic planning 

• Reporting support; partnering where required to surface important content to aid decision making. Continuous review of existing reports to prevent inefficiency or duplication. 

• Month end responsibility areas: ownership of sales, product margin and commercial gross margin adjustments (including freight and volume rebates)

• Management and prioritisation of Exec/DLT asks (capacity, nature of ask, importance of output to decision making) 

• Development of team members through coaching, nature of task, and level of exposure 

• Continuous improvement mindset embedded in the team 

Essential Skills

• Proven line management experience, delivering through others 

• Commercially minded, with a genuine drive to make a difference and support Dunelm to achieve its growth and profitability targets 

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, able to condense complex information into clear messages to gain understanding and buy-in 

• A good relationship builder building trust with key stakeholders and able to influence 

• Finance qualified, with broad finance experience and knowledge, able to represent the whole finance function with stakeholders 

• Equally comfortable in the high level and directional as the detailed and accurate and able to flex approach based on the circumstances  

• Comfortable with ambiguity and changing priorities and able to lead a team through continuous re-prioritisation to ensure the best value outcomes are delivered 

Behaviors

Communicating – Making the complex easy to understand, influencing and engaging others to achieve support for decisions and actions 

Curiosity – A desire to truly understand the business operations and to question why things are done the way they are. Always probing beyond the first answer.  

Adapting – Having the courage to change direction to achieve outcomes. Creating a safe environment for the team to experiment and learn. 

Thinking Big – Using internal and external networks and knowledge to suggest and influence change 

Challenging – Being the voice of constructive dissent to help reach better outcomes; shape opinions and challenge thinking 

Making It Happen – Cutting through complexity to deliver agilely against the most important outcomes. Set clear roles, responsibilities and expectations with your team.