Senior Manager

Reports To: Financial Mastery Partner

Department/Area: Financial Mastery

Based at:

Hybrid (Ilkley Office at least 2 day per week + home working)

Role Summary:

• The focus for an Ascentis Senior Manager is the delivery (personally and through a small team) of financial statements and insights which together with our “Action + Traction + Progress = Your Success” approach, supports our clients to improve the growth, profitability and control of their business. And so, allows them to achieve their personal vision of success.

• Success in this role is based not just on consistently delivering “super compliance”, BUT building on this foundation to provide financial insights and advice that has a tremendous positive impact on the client and their business.

• A successful Ascentis Senior Manager will see technology as the essential enabler in achieving this insight and advice in an accurate, consistent and time effective manner across their team.

Role Specification - Key Responsibilities and Accountabilities:

• Independently set up and deploy Xero and other integrated App’s to prepare financial processes, statements and reports for clients.

• Set up and prepare management accounts and reports to meet the needs of the business, business owner and management team.

• Prepare (both personally and via the “Accounts Production” team), present and submit accounts for companies and groups.

• Liaise with the Tax Partner to provide clients with integrated tax advice.

• Monitor accounting standards developments and ensure the client is fully compliant with HMRC and all other applicable regulatory and reporting frameworks.

• Independently analyse, evaluate and communicate (with support from Partners) business performance to client’s and provide appropriate ‘actionable insights’ to help them improve their business performance.

• Support clients to take action, sustain this action in the medium term and so, to achieve progress towards their goals, both business and personal.

• Demonstrate strong professional standards and ethics with colleagues, clients and stakeholders.

• Manage multiple personal, team and client priorities effectively in a fast changing, busy environment.

• Think proactively about the future, looking at both your own and the team’s development and use judgement to seek specialist or more senior input when necessary.

• Deliver our client “Accounts Health Check” program and contribute to the annual performance reviews.

• Process map client’s businesses and ensure financial process accurately support and provide the insight to develop the business performance

• Identify potential client efficiencies through new app introductions, and project manage their implementation within the “App Stack”. (see end notes)

• Deploy our Xero “Insights” Apps (dynamic reporting), and develop bespoke KPI’s for clients.

• Manage a small team of accountants to deliver the overall workload in a high impact and efficient manner. Seeking opportunities to improve this through training, coaching or technology as appropriate

• Oversee and monitor our VFO team with their bookkeeping and management accounting problem solving.

Person Description:

At Ascentis Values and personal Attitudes are the critical considerations in our recruitment, staff appraisal and developmental processes. We recruit first for “FIT” with these aspects and then for technical ability or experience.

Our Diligence Value describes the importance of a consistent, conscientious and professional approach to everything we do. It reflects great attention to detail and striving for accuracy to produce the highest quality outcome for the client. Frankly, we’re a bit fanatical about Diligence.

Our Integrity Value means always acting in an open, fair and honest way Even where it’s not what we necessarily want to hear, we listen first then decide the outcome.

Integrity requires us to do the right thing consistently, underpinned by strong personal, practice and industry principles and professional standards.

Our Influence Value describes the positive attitude and ambition that we expect from ourselves. Influence comes first through the impact and value delivered by our day to day activity. We deliver our promises and exceed them where possible.

Our Value of Learning describes our focus on continuous improvement in our knowledge and skills. This drives a ‘Kaizen’ approach to our deployment of technology, our systems and processes, and our client facing tools and techniques. Learning for us is a process and state of mind not a destination.

Attitudes

• Enjoys a well honed system
• Demands excellent client service levels from themselves.
• Takes “ownership” of their role and responsibilities.
• Thrives on change.
• Likes to keep projects organised and on track.
• Enjoys client facing assignments and communicating the meaning behind the numbers and creating actionable insights for clients.
• Has an appetite for personal development, feedback and regular learning.
• Recognises the benefit of being challenged and stretched.
• Has a desire to make a difference and takes personal pride in having a real impact on a business and client.

Experience

• Come from either a practice or industry background.
• Be a qualified Accountant with a minimum 5 years PQE.
• Have a minimum 2 years of cloud accounting experience
• Live within the wider Leeds/Bradford/Harrogate area.

Key Skills / Competencies:

Functional Skills

• Prepares or reviews financial statements, corporate financial and integrated reports and calculations for single entities and groups using appropriate technology.
• Able to set up and operate Xero and connect appropriate Apps depending on business needs
• Excellent project management skills
• Comprehensive understanding of existing and forthcoming legislation and accounting standards.
• Strong understanding of the PEST influences on the business environment generally

Communication

• Excellent communication skills, verbal, presentations and written with strong experience of relating financial performance into actionable business insights.

• Ability to develop senior internal and external relationships, creating confidence and credibility.

• Able to produce clear technical reports and commercial proposals.

Strategy & planning

• Excellent personal and team effectiveness and workload management skills and experience, in fast moving environments.

• Proactively supports progress towards the overall company objectives and strategy.

• Leads planning and implementation for specific personal, team and organisational developments.

Creativity

• Promotes a team culture of learning, change and innovation.

• Spots and develops commercial, technology and client opportunities or challenges and systemises creative solutions.

People Skills & Management

• Leads, manages and develops a positive team spirit and demonstrates a high-performance culture.

• Works across the business as part of a management team. Working with both the Leadership team, the wider organisation and clients.

• Has strong self-awareness and applies high professional and ethical standards under pressure.

Decision Making/Problem solving

• Makes decisions that have a long-term impact by analysing, evaluating and communicating financial and business performance.

• Ability to absorb large quantities of statistical and written material, spotting trends in data.

• Responsible for managing up to £500K budget
• Responsible for delivering commercial and/or investment targets of up to £3m

About Ascentis LLP and the Opportunity.

And in return we are offering:

• Salary £45k - £55k per annum dependent on experience.
• Laptop + home office station
• Flexible, hybrid location working arrangements
• 28 days annual leave plus statutory holidays.
• Expense account.

And the opportunity to join a team that is:

• Established in 2000, and now has 3 partners and 1 associate partner.
• “Investors in People” gold standar accredited
• We are, and intend to remain, in the mix of leading cloud / technology led accountants.
• We’ve been paperless for 15+ years and cloud based xero+App lovers for 10+ years.
• Practice systems are:
• Xero (Platinum Champions)
• Office management - Gsuite
• Compliance and work flow – TaxCalc

• Authorised Partners to the DiSC psychometric profiling system, offering clients advanced strategic planning, coaching and peer board support.
• We work across sectors for SME’s that aspire to grow and / or improve the performance of their business.
• Our typical client has a £1.5m turnover with 10 or more staff. We do not typically act for clients who have been operating for less than 3 years, or who have a turnover of less that £500K, or who are based more than 50 miles from Leeds.
• We have modern office and meeting room facilities in Ilkley, with serviced offices and meeting room facilities at ‘Platform’ in Leeds.

This is a tremendous opportunity, for the right person, to join a team which is striving to make a difference.

We believe there’s a better way, a more successful and enjoyable way, for our clients to run their businesses.

Our purpose is to help them find that better way and so, achieve their personal vision of success.

We help our clients to do this using ‘The Ascentis Way’

This is: Action > Traction > Progress = Success

This way of working takes business owners through a proven process that ultimately achieves their personal vision of success. And fulfils our reason for being here.

It’s not easy but it works…

And every day this work nudges us one step closer to our vision of:

A Future Where Every Business Owner Is Less Stressed, Has More Time, Makes More Money, Has More Fun And Is Personally Fulfilled.

App Stacks the Ascentis Way

Level 1

Business Services such as:

• Bank feeds, Payroll,
• Dext prepare - expenses
• TripCatcher - mileage

Level 2

Insight, CRM, Payment Services such as:

• Stripe, Go Cardless,
• Futrli – forecasting, Fluidly – cash flow modelling
• Satago - credit scoring,
• Capsule - CRM

Level 3

Sector specific

• SIMpro – construction and service sector
• Vend – Retail, Workflow MAX – consulting
• iZettle – hospitality sector

Level 4

Sector specific – but not yet integrated with Xero

• Blue Hub, One SaaS
• Rsult – API builder