Job title: Head of Finance and Operations

Job salary: £80,000 - £90,000 per annum

Job location: London, SE1 (hybrid working, minimum 2 days per week in the office)

Deadline: Friday, April 5th, 2024

Purpose of the job

The Head of Finance and Operations is the key position in Smart Energy GB to ensure all matters relating to finance and the running of our offices are well managed. The role is broad and will take responsibility for the successful delivery of day-to-day financial operations of Smart Energy GB. The role reports to and supports the Director of Operations in the oversight of the organisation’s financial processes, including internal and external reporting.

We expect some degree of change in the years ahead. This role will have an important role in guiding the organisation through the change ahead.

Key tasks and responsibilities

• Be a full member of the management group and play a positive role in the management of our organisation

Finance

• Support the Director of Operations in the implementation of the organisation’s financial strategy
• Managing day-to-day financial operations including the work of the (outsourced) bookkeeping function
• Oversee the preparation of monthly management accounts (including cashflow forecast and balance sheet)
• Close liaison with the budget holders to ensure accurate forecasting
• Responsibility for the internal control environment, ensuring compliance with best practice processes
• Ensuring core controls are in place around month end, year end and across all financial processes
• Responsibility for treasury management and credit control
• Ensure compliance with all tax rules and regulations
• Lead on the production of the year end accounts
• Liaise with the external auditors to ensure year end audit completes to timescale
• Support the Director of Operations in the co-ordination of the budget-setting process
• Managing the cashflow throughout the year to ensure the organisation can meet its liabilities as they fall due
• Support wider members of the team on finance matters including compliance with agreed processes and procedures
• Line manage the Finance Manager

Operations

• Ensure the offices (one in London and one ‘WeWork’ in Scotland) are professionally maintained to create an excellent impression to staff and visitors
• Ensure that the facilities within the offices meet the needs of all users
• Primary liaison with the landlord, external contractors and the local council
• Ensure meeting rooms are always professionally maintained
• To ensure that the budget for all office-related costs is set accurately and expenditure is managed within budget throughout the year
• Line manage the Senior Operations and Events Manager

Skills, experience, and competencies

Essential

• Qualified accountant
• Experience of financial management within an organisation of similar size and scale of Smart Energy GB
• Strong appreciation of best practice financial controls and procedures • Experience of organisational change and transformation.
• A commercial mindset that can advise internal stakeholders
• Excellent communication skills, being able to communication complicated financial information to a variety of internal stakeholders including the Audit and Risk Committee
• An understanding of the work, aims, and role of Smart Energy GB
• Management accounting and budget-setting experience
• An understanding and appreciation of office management of a similar size and scale of Smart Energy GB
• Appreciation of how an excellent physical environment can support a great place to work
• Appreciation of the objectives and activities of Smart Energy GB
• Appreciation of the diversity of the people and communities of Great Britain and how to embrace this diversity in your approach to work

Desirable

• Knowledge of marketing and communications sector
• Working with outsourced financial support
• Familiarity of relevant tax rules and regulations

Welcome to Smart Energy GB. It’s our task to engage everyone in England Scotland and Wales with the national rollout of smart meters - and we are all thrilled to have this once-in-a-career chance to communicate with the whole of our diverse nation.

Every British home and microbusiness has the opportunity to upgrade to new gas and electricity smart meters, which will utterly transform the way we all buy and use energy and pave the way to a smarter, more energy efficient future. It’s one of the biggest technological and infrastructural investments of our time, the smart meter rollout has already converted just over 50 per cent of British households. The goal for this voluntary technological upgrade is to engage every household in Great Britain, and so there is a continuing critical role for Smart Energy GB in the years ahead (government has recently indicated that Smart Energy GB’s campaign should continue until at least 2025, and potentially beyond).

Our campaign is one of the most far-reaching of any campaign in the country. We are talking to consumers from all backgrounds, across the whole of Great Britain. Our legal duties mean that we have a particular need to make sure that consumers who are harder to reach or need greater support are not left behind (already an important part of our responsibilities and likely to be an increasing focus over the period leading to 2025).

It’s an exciting time to join one of the most talented and creative teams in the country. We have an exciting mission, and we pride ourselves on having a fully inclusive working environment.

We love what we do. We are flexible, eager to learn and hugely motivated by this chance to be part of one of the biggest-ever behaviour change campaigns, which brings with it benefits for both individual households and the environment.

We’re looking forward to meeting you, and hope you’ll be as fired up about the challenge ahead as we are.

The Smart Energy GB team

Smart Energy GB is an equal opportunity employer and we value diversity. We use data to measure the effectiveness of our attraction and selection methods to ensure that they are fair and equitable and that opportunities at Smart Energy GB are accessible to people from all backgrounds.

We actively encourage applications from currently under-represented groups. We have identified ethnic minority, lower socio-economic background, disability and gender as the key areas we would like to focus our recruitment efforts in.

What do we do at Smart Energy GB to promote diversity and inclusion?

Every person who applies for a role at Smart Energy GB is asked to complete a diversity questionnaire and they are asked whether or not they consent to their diversity data being taken into consideration at the shortlisting stage.

Disability Confident Scheme

We have the Disability Confident Leader status and we are committed to making our recruitment practices as inclusive and fair as possible for all applicants. Disability Confident is a government scheme designed to help us make the most of the talents of those with disabilities and/or health conditions in the workplace.

All disabled applicants who meet the minimum requirements of the job as set out in the job description and person specification will be guaranteed an interview. If there’s anything we can do to make our interview process or working environment more inclusive and to meet your particular needs please let us know. Our offices have full wheelchair access.

We consider our commitment to the Disability Confident scheme in many aspects of our work life, including our offices. We moved to a new London office in September 2021, and having an accessible layout was a high priority in this search.

All In Champions

We’re committed to creating a workplace where everyone feels like they belong. That’s why we’re proud to be one of the first organisations awarded All In Champion status, as part of the Advertising Association, ISBA and IPA’s initiative. To achieve this, we provided evidence that we have adopted the first six actions from the All In Action Plan – improving the experience and representation of:

• Black talent
• Disabled talent
• Working-class talent
• Women
• Asian talent
• Older talent

You can read more about how to become an All In Champion and what it means here.

Rooney Rule

We are building a team that is able to understand the needs of and effectively communicate with the whole of our diverse nation. We want our team to reflect the diversity of the wider population. This includes the representation of people from ethnic minorities and lower socio-economic backgrounds. We apply the Rooney Rule to achieve this.

Subject to consent, out of the candidates who meet the essential selection criteria for the role and who are from ethnic minority or lower socio-economic backgrounds, at least one will be shortlisted for the next stage in the recruitment process, which is usually an interview.

Every member of our team goes above and beyond, helps one another out and contributes to the achievement of our ambitious goals. We think it’s only right for us to reward them accordingly:

• Competitive pension scheme
• 25 days annual leave (plus bank holidays)
• Gym memberships
• Private medical insurance
• Annual health check
• Annual eye test
• Season ticket loan
• 5 annual volunteer days
• £1,000 (net) work anniversary gift
• Local discounts with Better Bankside Buzz Offers
• Option to buy additional annual leave
• Option to take out a personal loan
• Cycle to work scheme
• Free standard breakfast and healthy snacks provided in the office
• An in-house wellbeing programme, Thrive

Thrive

We take our role as an employer seriously and work hard to create a great place for people to work. But we also have an opportunity to support our employees outside work. In order to do so, we’ve rolled out Thrive; a programme to help our people live healthier, feel better and deal with life’s curveballs.

Through our employee assistance programme we’re all able to, anonymously and confidentially, access financial, medical and mental health advice if we would ever need it. We’ve even extended this offer to our employees’ immediate families. Throughout the year we also invite various experts, such as mental health and wellbeing coaches to help us live life a little smarter.

Alongside this, we also have the ‘Thrive Room’ in our London office, which is used as a private and comfortable space. It can be used for people to take time out, meditate, pray, or for new mums returning to work who may be breastfeeding and need to express milk.