Finance Operations Lead at Sama

About the Job:

You will work within the Global Service Delivery team as part of our Operations team. 

As a Financial Operations (revenue operations) Specialist, you will be responsible for the accuracy and timeliness of customer invoices as well as forecasting customer monthly recurring revenue. You will directly work with Senior Directors, Directors, Portfolio Leads and Delivery Managers to ensure operational changes are reflected in the Forecasted revenue. You will also work with the global team to ensure customer billing and invoicing are closed on time and accurately.  Working with the global Finance team and Analytics teams, you will provide analysis of revenue forecasts and past trends.  You will own the Master Forecast across Sales, Finance, and Service delivery.

This role reports directly to the Senior Director level. 

Key Responsibilities: 

• Updating primary dashboard root files with actual and forecasted customer revenue data
• Coordinating with project managers for near-term updates to customer revenue based on operational changes (Headcount, billing days, extra work, etc..)
• Ensure invoice trackers, revenue forecast sheets, and reports are accurate.  The “gatekeeper” of the single source of truth.
• Calculate and process billable revenue accurately and coordinate with global finance for timing invoicing.
• Developing reports and analysis using BI tools, or dashboards to analyze financial data and create financial models for decision support
• Perform financial forecasting, reporting, and operational metrics tracking, analyze and report on variances between projected revenue vs actual. 
• Preparing insightful reporting and analysis to support management decision making, and identify significant trends/issues, e.g. monitor performance against forecast and actual and highlighting commercial risk.
• Analysis of sales/margins - volume, price, mix vs. forecast - identifying issues, recommending actions, measuring outcomes.
• Driving margin enhancement initiatives, structure deals to drive optimal ROI.
• Driving the monthly business performance management process with senior management, ensuring accurate and timely delivery of information.
• Measuring and reporting monthly KPI's to senior management.
• Leading and improving the budgeting and forecasting processes including: agreeing, reviewing, challenging commercial targets with project leads.
• Providing assistance with modeling and scenario testing for new business opportunities.
• Lead weekly GSD stakeholder forecasting review meetings and sign off for accuracy.
• Understand the impacts created by metrics such as billable utilization and articulate the drivers for low or high billable utilization.
• Work with the Business Intelligence team to articulate reporting gaps, needs and improvements for dashboards and other reporting points.
• Audit key data points that feed into dashboards and ensure accuracy of the underlying data points.
• Review Combined Capacity for GSD and the link between billable headcount, revenue targets and actuals.

Minimum Qualifications: 

• Bachelor's Degree in Finance, Business Management or some other relevant degree 
• 3-5 years of experience working in Finance Operations role
• Experience in forecasting and financial analysis
• Have good knowledge of invoicing process, operational finance. 
• Candidates with CPA-K may have added advantage
• Advanced/master  knowledge of Spreadsheets
• Proven ability to create insightful dashboards by use of available visualization tools

Preferred Qualifications:

• Get things done attitude & ready to go the extra mile in delivering key aspects of the role in a high paced environment.
• Should be assertive and have the ability to drive change.
• Strong technical and numerical skills with advanced Excel skills
• Strong communication skills (both written and verbal) - ability to clearly communicate complex quantitative analysis in actionable insights
• Detail-oriented and passion for problem-solving
• Ability to work on own initiative or as part of a team.
• Knowledge of data tools, experience in basic SQL and G-suite applications would be an added advantage