Principal Finance Business Partner

Job Description

The Principal Finance Business Partner will act as a strategic advisor to the Commercial business unit, providing high quality commercial insight, challenge and decision support to support value creation.

This role leads a team of three Finance Business Partners and owns the end‑to‑end financial planning cycle (budgets, forecasts, and strategic plans) as well as commercial compliance reporting, ensuring the business delivers sustainable growth and strong financial control.

A key focus of the role is driving improvements in finance processes, systems, and reporting to enable a more efficient, accurate, and insightful performance management framework.

Core Responsibilities

Business partner to the Commercial leadership team, providing strategic guidance, scenario analysis, and clear recommendations

• Lead monthly performance review processes, providing clear narrative insight on variances, drivers, and forward‑looking risks and opportunities
• Enhance KPIs and dashboards that support commercial decision‑making
• Oversee the preparation of robust business cases, financial models, and investment appraisals to support strategic decision-making
• Ensure compliance with all regulatory submissions, including embedding compliance monitoring into the business reporting frameworks

Team management

• Lead, coach, and develop a team of Finance Business Partners, ensuring high‑quality analysis, stakeholder engagement, and professional development
• Set clear objectives, prioritise activities, and build a culture of accountability, curiosity, and continuous improvement

Planning, Budgeting & Forecasting

• Lead the Group's end‑to‑end planning, budgeting, forecasting and strategic planning cycles, ensuring alignment and high‑quality outputs across all business units and adherence to a project timeline
• Consolidate Group P&L, balance sheet, cash flow and KPIs, delivering clear, actionable insight for the Executive Team and Board-level reporting
• Enhance planning tools, methodologies and reporting structures, driving greater automation, efficiency and consistency across the Group

General Responsibilities

• Ensure all information prepared is robust, compliant, and consistent and that it supports both current activities and future growth requirements
• Proactively identify areas of improvement and work with others to implement and see these through to completion

About You

Essential Skills & Expertise

• Fully qualified accountant (e.g. CIMA, ACA, ACCA) or equivalent financial qualification (e.g. CFA) with significant post qualified experience
• Proven ability to lead planning cycles and in managing a team
• Excellent IT skills including MS Office suite
• Business process improvement mindset - to drive improvements in processes

Desirable (but not essential) Skills & Expertise

• Utilities sector experience

Key Attributes/Competencies

Understanding the business

• Quickly gain a strong understanding of the business to make effective financial decisions
• You will have a questioning mind, not accepting of answers at face value, you will seek to obtain corroborating evidence for financial information
• Making complex decisions balancing competing demands
• Show financial acumen, being able to interpret financial data and explain it clearly and concisely

Building collaborative relationships

• You will hold strong relationships with other members of the business including managing C-Suite and wider Senior Leadership team
• Have the gravitas to influence a wide variety of different stakeholders to deliver projects or processes through these different stakeholders
• You will be able to manage conflict including different priorities

Performance & results oriented

• You will have a 'can do' attitude. Demonstrating persistence to work through complex problems independently
• You will have flexibility to deal with different finance issues across broad spectrum of tasks
• You will hold yourself and others accountable to consistently achieve results

Flexible & Adaptable

• Able to manage ambiguity
• Resilient and confident to have challenging conversation

What's in it for you...

• Healthcare plan, life assurance and generous pension contribution
• Volunteering Day
• Hybrid Working
• Various company discounts (including shops, gyms, days out and events)
• Holiday of 25 days (plus bank holidays) & ability to buy/sell days
• Cycle to work scheme, car pooling and onsite parking available

As a valued member of the team, you will be supporting the Group Environmental Policy and its associated sustainability objectives and targets.

Flexibility Statement

The fast moving nature of the business means that from time to time you may be asked to perform duties or tasks outside of your original job description on an ad hoc basis. This allows the company to utilise our people in the best possible way at all times and helps our colleagues to make the best contribution in a changing environment.

Ecotricity is Britain's overall greenest energy company - it's more than just green energy - the breadth and depth of our work on green issues is unmatched. When we started back in 1995, we were the first company in the world to provide a new kind of electricity - the green kind.

Our mission was, and remains, to change the way energy is made and used in Britain - by replacing fossil fuels with clean, renewable energy.

We don't just supply green energy, we use the money from our customers' bills to make it ourselves too - we have built windmills and sun parks in Britain. We call this turning 'bills into mills'.

We don't just focus on energy though- we built the Electric Highway, Britain's leading network of electric vehicle charging points; we helped Forest Green Rovers become the greenest football club in the world; and we launched Britain's greenest mobile phone service, Ecotalk, where they use the money from their customers' bills to protect and regenerate Britain's lost rainforests.

Ecotricity is an equal opportunities employer and is committed to providing equality for all.