Role: Finance Business Partner (6 month FTC)

Location: Shoreham by Sea, UK – Hybrid

Role ID: 2025-3036

Our vision is to create a safe and sustainable world.

Ricardo plc is a global strategic, environmental, and engineering consulting company. With over 100 years of engineering excellence and employing close to 3,000 employees in more than 20 countries, we provide exceptional levels of expertise in delivering leading-edge and innovative cross-sector sustainable products and solutions. Every day, we enable our customers to solve the most complex and dynamic challenges to help achieve a safe and sustainable world.

Role Purpose 

Support the business partnering stream and in conjunction with the Senior Finance Business Partner, provide financial support and insight to project and operational leaders across the UK, North America, and Europe clusters. This includes delivering accurate monthly forecasts, analysing financial performance, and driving accountability through robust reporting and variance analysis. The role plays a key part in ensuring margin, utilisation and cash targets are met, and financial controls are consistently applied.   This role ideally requires a September start and will initially be a 6 month fixed term contract.

Key Responsibilities 

• Partner with project managers and business leads to monitor project financial performance and investigate variances 

• Manage the Results Analysis process in line with the monthly timetable, the agreed Business Review actions and risks & opportunities. 

• Sign off the final revenue position each month in consultation with the Regional Finance Manager. 

• Coordinate the Project Review process (PRT), including maintenance of PSR key information such as dates, CP updates and notes. 

• Prepare and review monthly forecasts and contribute to the annual budget cycle 

• Support monthly reporting, including commentary on results, risks and opportunities 

• Monitor and drive improvements in working capital, focusing on invoicing, WIP and debtor follow-up 

• Review and maintain project financial data in ERP systems, ensuring accuracy and alignment with accounting policies 

• Assist in the preparation of business cases, commercial reviews, and margin analysis 

• Contribute to monthly portfolio reviews, supporting challenge and decision-making 

• Provide first-line finance support to operational teams, including timesheet accuracy, cost centre coding and internal compliance 

• Support internal and external audit requests and contribute to the completion of ICQ and ACC submissions 

• Undertake ad-hoc financial analysis and support improvement initiatives as required 

Key Competencies and Experience

• Commercially minded, with the ability to interpret data and communicate financial insight 

• Confident engaging with stakeholders at all levels and building strong working relationships 

• Detail-focused, proactive and organised, with the ability to meet reporting deadlines 

• Comfortable working with complexity across multiple business units and time zones 
• Adaptable and willing to challenge the status quo to improve outcomes. 
• Part-qualified or qualified accountant (ACA, ACCA, CIMA or equivalent) 

• Experience in financial analysis, management reporting, or project accounting 

• Proficient in Excel with working knowledge of ERP systems such as SAP or Changepoint 

• Experience in professional services, consulting, or project-based environments is desirable 

Working here

You will be warmly welcomed into our workplace where every voice matters. We are diverse thinkers and doers, coming together to create a culture of inclusion. We will support you to find your place.

We will encourage you to use your passion and expertise to make a positive impact through the projects you work on.  Your knowledge and desire to bring about change will be invaluable in helping deliver innovative solutions that support communities across the globe in becoming safer and more sustainable.

Work life balance 

We offer flexible approaches to work, whether that is working from home, being in the office, or as a hybrid worker. We're happy to discuss flexible working arrangements. Wellbeing is at the core to our culture, allowing employees to flourish and to achieve their full potential.

Benefits

We want you to know how much you are valued. Your remuneration and benefits package will reflect that. You will receive a range of benefits which include support for your physical and mental health. 

Our core benefits include 25 days' annual leave, plus 8 flexible bank holidays, a competitive company pension scheme, life assurance and professional subscriptions reimbursement. We also offer a wide range of flexible benefits to suit your lifestyle.

Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion statement

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer, we believe in each person's potential, and we'll help you reach yours. We have an ambitious diversity, equality, and inclusion approach as explained here. We value diversity; recognising that a more diverse workforce creates a richer and more varied working environment. Diversity also drives innovation, by allowing us to offer our clients the best consultancy service that we can. As part of our commitment to engage positively and pro-actively with all our employees and to ensure an inclusive culture, we are a recognised as a 'disability confident' employer.

Next steps

Once you have submitted your application a member of our Recruitment Team will be in touch. Please be aware that the timing can vary dependent on the volume of applications that we receive for each role and in some cases, we may start to review applications prior to the closing date.

Ricardo is a Disability confident employer please advise the recruitment team via recruit@ricardo.com if you require any adjustments to support you throughout the recruitment process.

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