Who are we?
Thames Water is the UK’s largest water and wastewater company. We make a daily difference to our 15 million customers by supplying 2.6 billion litres of water through 32,000 km’s of pipes, to keep taps flowing and toilets flushing. We are an essential service and have operated throughout the Covid19 pandemic.
At Thames Water, every one of our actions, big and small, matters every day. Water is essential to daily life, and that means our business is always open.
What you will be doing
Reporting to the Head of Finance - Water, the Water Networks Regional Finance Manager will assume a hands-on role with responsibility for the day-to-day financial management and business partnering for the Repair & Maintenance (“R&M”) business unit within Water Networks. This role will cover all three regions (North London, South London and Thames Valley).
The candidate will be a highly driven, self-motivated and organised individual, capable of managing a diverse range of financial workstreams, business partnering the Heads of all three regions and line managing the respective management accountants. This will include working alongside them in a variety of supporting functions including driving performance, decision support, challenging third party spend, managing budgets and delivering efficiency targets.
The candidate will be able to demonstrate strategic and commercial thinking and core analytical skills, alongside an effective communication style which helps to challenge and influence decision making.
The R&M business delivers c£200m p.a. totex spend – largely through our third party supply chain – to ensure clean drinking water is safely, reliably and efficiently delivered from water production assets to the customer. R&M covers an extensive value chain from leak detection to planning & scheduling, repair and reinstatement. This business unit is responsible for the majority of Thames Water’s annual leakage repair activity.
We’re looking for you to:
- Able to deliver a best-in-class finance business partnering service to the Heads of Regions and their wider teams, helping them understand their finances and supporting, influencing and challenging their decision making
- Oversee all transactional activities including monthly management accounts, efficiency reporting, R&O updates and regional reforecasts, and semi-annual statutory and regulatory accounts, ensuring compliance with relevant governance and methodology
- Lead discussions on financial performance and outlook with the three regional leadership teams, their key external stakeholders (including IA representatives), Head of Finance and Head of Water Networks
- Manage FP&A processes for R&M and generation of outputs tailored for different audiences, including local business plans, and supporting the Head of Finance with longer term financial planning processes
- Work in partnership with the leadership teams, external stakeholders and Head of Finance to help deliver in-year efficiency targets and identify opportunities to reduce ‘wastage’ in the medium term
- Help generate business cases for proposed spend for assessment with the Head of Finance and Head of Water Networks
- Drive value through process challenge and design ensuring accuracy for financial and, where relevant, non-financial information
- Maintain and continuously improve robustness of financial systems and processes
Line manage a team of three senior management accountants
- Highly driven, self-motivated and organised – able to proactively set the agenda as well as delivering a remit
- Strong proficiency and curiosity in working with complex financial, operational and commercial data to understand performance
- Able to demonstrate strategic and commercial thinking to generate powerful questions and new ideas
This person is ideally a qualified accountant with management accounting experience. Experience of the utility sector will also aid transition into the role - prior experience of working with a large operational business is important.
Travel within the regions will be required as this is a business facing role.
What’s in it for you?
Our competitive salary package includes an excellent contributory pension, 26 days holiday per year increasing to 30 with the length of service and a wider benefits scheme.
We’re proud of the positive ways of working we have adopted during the pandemic. We want to create a more flexible and dynamic environment so all our colleagues can thrive. For our office-based roles we are moving to a hybrid approach where we will provide options around working from our offices, our operational sites and home dependent on role/team/individual. This will be discussed during the assessment process.
Thames Water is a unique, rewarding and diverse place to work. If you join our team, you’ll enjoy fast-tracked career opportunities, flexible working arrangements and unparalleled benefits. We’re also proud to be an equal opportunity employer, Stonewall Diversity Champion and Disability Confident Leader and we are a Times Top 50 Employer for Women.
You can find out more in our working for us section of our website.