University of the West of England

Senior Business Modelling Analyst at Condé Nast

London, Greater London, United Kingdom

Condé Nast

Senior Business Modelling Analyst

- Lead business partner to CIO and Managing editor, first point of contact for all financial information.•	Full responsibility for budgeting, forecasting reporting across Editorial and Technology, budgets of over £150m, ensuring timely, accurate, reliable and quality outputs for all business areas.•	Finance lead in £10m operational review across the business. Responsible for driving initiatives that would deliver this savings and track against plan, identifying shortfalls and making recommendations as to how this shortfall could be mitigated – Savings achieved June 2017.•	Incorporate synergies across departments to drive and deliver initiatives that evolve reporting and management information for key stakeholders in a uniform manner.•	Key influencer in providing reporting and management information to senior exec and stakeholders, delivering constructive and strategic solutions to business issues and offering solutions to enhance business performance.•	Responsible for all headcount reporting across Editorial and Technology 500+ employees. Ensuring salaries are aligned to budget, new starters are budgeting for and recruited in line with vacancies, bonuses are calculated accurately and any shortfalls to budget are identified and challenged with department heads.•	Finance lead in developing processes and systems to aid in improving efficiencies across budgeting and forecasting. Ensuring processes have been streamlined to meet deadlines whilst still providing high quality data and information for all business areas at a sufficiently granular level.•	Finance lead across business area for reducing month end close from 7 days to 5 days.•	Line Manager to x2 editorial management accountant and x1 technology management accountant, ensure their outputs are provided in a timely manner and are accurate. Also to act as their mentor to ensure they are proactively seeking career progression and that relevant training is provided.

TELEGRAPH MEDIA GROUP LIMITED

Finance Business Partner Editorial & Technology

- Provide financial support for all aspects of Marketing & Sales and Circulation•	Work closely with the Acquisition and Retention team to monitor their costs weekly by reviewing data form Sale force to get an accurate SAC by channel, identifies which acquisition strategies/ campaigns are not generating the desired sales volumes•	Finance lead in tenders presented to sales agencies, where levels of discounts and commissions are negotiated. I have done a vast amount of value adding work in this area, splitting commissions down to tiered levels, so that we are able to match packs sold at a revenue generated level and offset this against customer lifetime revenue and commission paid out.•	Responsible for calculating and reporting of Circulation KPI’s each week, including CPU’s for major activity, and CPA’s where relevant, whilst reporting on year on year base performance using information from the Sales teams•	Co-ordinate and prepare key financial analysis on the performance and impact of all activity, both before and after the event, using business estimates and projections or actual results as appropriate•	Responsible for the preparation and sign off for Marketing & Sales budget/ Forecast. •	Liaise with non-financial managers to ensure all budget modelling is robust and the most efficient use of company money•	Processing all relevant inputs to the budgeting and forecasting cycles, and contributing as requested for the five year plan process•	Responsible for preparation and analysis of Sales and Marketing and Circulation month end, identifying key drivers of variances•	Feed back to teams monthly performance, in summary with KPI’s to enable them to track spend and performance for future months, and look at possible solution to mitigate and over/under spends. •	Act as mentor to two junior analysts, monitor their outputs to ensure data provided is accurate and provided in a timely fashion

News UK

Senior Financial Analyst

- Support the Commercial Management team on matters that have a financial implication - short and long term. •	Provide support and business cases for range reviews, new promotions, buying decisions, funding decisions•	Weekly review of category performance and supporting/challenging the trading teams in delivering these numbers.•	Timely communication of risks and opportunities to profit and cost targets•	Establish and manage robust financial controls with regards to margin reporting and sources of financial information sent out to commercial teams. •	Delivery of robust budgeting/forecasting and 3 year plans to business timelines, ensuring that the commercial teams are fully involved in the process.•	Pro-actively review Junior Trading Analyst output to the business ensuring that it is accurate and provides a valid conclusion on the business activity.•	Sole responsibility for completion and review of sales and margin period accounts, before senior executive review.•	Liaise with commercial areas of the business to ensure that that they fully understand their period account numbers, assessing mix, rate and volume miss. Work with commercial teams to put a plan in place to mitigate these loses in the coming months. •	Finance representative at Category Initiative meeting where future business plans and ideas to drive sales and margin are reviewed.•	Provide financial advice and input into assessing the viability of these future plans and ideas to ensure all financial costs and benefits are considered thoroughly. •	Prioritising conflicting demands to ensure that a high level of service is delivered at all times.

Wh Smith Retail

Senior financial trading analyst

- Support the Director of Operations and senior management team to help build a long term, cost efficient and sustainable function. •	Act as first point of contact for all financial aspects in relation to International and Operations.•	Monitor and guide management on revenue, volume and yield performance, of International and Operations in terms of key strategic and operational objectives.•	Assist Director and senior management team to manage costs against budget and forecast through provision of routine P&L reporting, supported by accrual/prepayment transaction listings and associated payroll reports.•	Provision of monthly results and board commentary for management.•	Provide Strategy Director and Head of International Content with analysis and guidance for Guardian and Observer International and Guardian Weekly products.•	Accounting for all GNM international revenue and costs. •	Construction and monitoring of all bonus/incentive schemes.•	Production of detailed budgets, forecasts and Medium Term Plans (MTP) with assessment for business risk and business assurance.•	Main finance lead for investment appraisal, business cases, capital expenditure and new product development across International and Operations. Reviewing and evaluating the investment return on future IT capex projects, achieved through NPV and IRR calculation. Recommending changes to project spend to ensure that the project delivers a positive return on investment as well as achieve its project objective.•	Performance of ad hoc financial analysis eg: to determine profitability of proposed new business opportunities or to understand the impact of changes in volume or new products.•	Act as mentor and line manager to Assistant Business Analyst – International & Operations, including weekly 1-1 sessions to discuss and manage workload and delegation of tasks which are then supervised or reviewed by myself.

Guardian News & Media

Business Analyst - International & Operations

- Support the Head of Commercial Finance (HofCF) in providing financial guidance and advice to general managers in order to help build long term cost efficient and sustainable products.•	Support the HofCF in monitoring and managing revenue and cost performance of the products/business•	Deliver activity based performance, budgets, forecasts, stats and MTP on behalf of the products in line with GMG timelines and standards.•	Provide ad hoc financial reporting and analysis as required to support the management of the business.•	Full ownership of Guardian weekly, supplement reporting and pagination modelling. Main point of contact and attendee of all weekly management meetings as the finance representative.•	Provide commentary on significant product monthly variances to budget, reforecast and prior year, for review by the HofCF.•	Assist project teams where necessary with the design and implementation of finance process initiatives eg P2P, GiS.

Business analyst - newspapers

- Prepare monthly management accounts for PDS department, including posting of necessary prepayments and accruals.•	Ensure posting of PDS costs, split correctly down to bottom level product to enable in the production of product P&L’s.•	Administer departmental bonus scheme and post monthly bonus accruals.•	Provide commentary on significant monthly variances to budget, forecast and last year.•	Maintenance of headcount reporting, variance analysis to budget and forecast.•	Ownership of Guardian and Observer international P&L and month end processes.•	Ownership of the billing price calculations for the international print sites and main GNM finance contact for international export Administration Company.•	KPI reporting for month end, forecasts and budgets•	Key finance lead in the integration of new finance models (P2P, GiS) into the business. Required working closely with finance and non-finance managers to help them adapt to the new changes and business processes to ensure a smooth transition and deal with any follow up queries. Also required the ability to promote the use and value of these new processes to non-finance users in a manner which would help them to see and understand the benefits they would gain in the long term. •	Business lead in £4m costs saving initiative across PDS in 2009 and responsible for tracking savings month on month – task achieved

Business Analyst - Production, Distribution & Sales

Principle responsibility was to assist the senior management accountant and financial controller.•	Production of monthly management accounts•	Production of month end P&L’s and balance sheet reconciliations•	Weekly completion and review of forecast model for Finance Director, enabling him to assess future revenue and cost impact in the current month.•	Assist in the completion of quarterly end forecasts and annual budgets – to go on to own and create all revenue models used in this process to ensure smooth delivery and accuracy of figures to Finance Director and Managing Director within deadline.•	Supervise completion of weekly advertising statistics by junior members of staff

Amisha Morgan

Amisha Morgan