Overview
Finance Analyst – Maidenhead
Job Description
This role sits at the heart of a technically complex, people-driven consultancy business where accurate cost recovery, resource planning and financial transparency are critical to performance. As a Finance Analyst, you will play a key role in supporting the financial management of engineering disciplines, ensuring the integrity of staff cost data, charge-out rates and overhead recovery mechanisms that underpin project profitability and business planning.
Working closely with discipline leads and senior operational stakeholders, you will provide clear financial insight into headcount, utilisation, overhead performance and cost recovery. The role combines core FP&A responsibilities with hands-on involvement in the financial mechanics of a consultancy model, offering excellent exposure to business partnering with a commercial lens.
You will be part of the Group FP&A function, contributing to monthly reporting, forecasting and planning cycles. This is an excellent opportunity for someone looking to deepen their finance and commercial understanding and progress their career within a high-profile infrastructure and engineering environment.
For Internal Reference: Generic Job Description – FING01 – Finance Analyst .pdf
Responsibilities
Responsibilities
You will provide financial support and insight to discipline leads and functional stakeholders, helping them understand financial performance and cost drivers within the Engineering Consulting business.
The Primary responsibilities of this role are:
- Own and maintain the Engineering staff cost model, ensuring accurate headcount, award and cost data to support distribution rate calculations and reconciliation to timesheet system
- Develop and maintain discipline charge-out and distribution rates, supporting rate modelling, updates and audit requirements
- Partner with Discipline Leads to review monthly financial performance, providing clear analysis of variances, trends and risks
- Assist in the preparation of the Monthly Business Review (MBR) pack, including overhead analysis and commentary
- Support the budgeting and quarterly forecasting processes, including headcount planning and overhead cost modelling
- Oversee the shared services and the posting of standard month-end journals
- Prepare and post ad-hoc journals where required, ensuring appropriate controls and documentation
- Support half-year and year-end audit processes, responding to queries and providing required analysis
- Maintain and monitor the PO Tracer to support effective GRNI management and cost control
- Identify opportunities to improve financial processes, controls and reporting efficiency within the FP&A function
- Support wider FP&A team initiatives and ad-hoc analysis as required
Knowledge, Skills, and Experience
Essential
- Experience in a finance role +2 years
- Collaboration with stakeholders and identifying financial anomalies
Skills
- Strong analytical skills with the ability to interpret financial data, identify trends and explain key drivers of performance, particularly in a people-cost and overhead-driven environment. Able to interrogate cost movements and explain variances clearly and confidently.
- Working with Oracle Enterprise One, or similar ERP system desirable.
- Confident communicating financial concepts to non-financial stakeholders, including Discipline Leads and operational managers. Able to challenge constructively, ask probing questions and build credibility through accuracy and clarity
- Demonstrates strong attention to detail when maintaining headcount and cost date models. Understands how underlying date integrity impacts charge-out rates, cost recovery and business performance
- Comfortable working with ERP systems (Oracle Enterprise One or similar desirable) and large datasets. Identifies inefficiencies and proposes practical improvements to processes and reporting
- Good understanding of accounting principles, nominal ledger structures and internal controls. Recognises risk areas and ensures compliance with financial policies and separation of duties
- Able to manage competing deadlines during month-end, forecasting and budget cycle. Maintains accuracy and attention to detail under pressure
Personal attributes
- Shows genuine interest in understanding how the engineering consultancy operates and how financial metrics drive performance. Looks beyond the numbers to understand the “why”
- Takes ownership of tasks and follows through to completion. Identifies issues and proposes practical solutions rather than simply escalating problems
- Builds positive working relationships across finance and operational teams. Willingly shares knowledge and supports colleagues during busy periods.
- Comfortable asking questions to deepen understanding. Open to feedback and actively seeks opportunities to develop technical and commercial capability
- Maintains high levels of accuracy when handling sensitive financial and headcount data. Understands the downstream impact of errors in rate calculations and reporting
Qualifications
Essential
Qualifications
- Part Qualified Chartered Accountant or Certified Practicing Accountant (ACA/ACCA/CIMA)
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About Us
Costain helps to improve people’s lives with integrated, leading edge, smart infrastructure solutions across the UK’s energy, water, transportation and defence markets. We help our clients improve their business performance by increasing capacity, improving customer service, safeguarding security, enhancing resilience, decarbonising and delivering increased efficiency. Our vision is to be the UK’s leading smart infrastructure solutions company. We will achieve this by focusing on blue chip clients whose major spending plans are underpinned by strategic national needs, regulatory commitments, legislation or essential performance requirements. We offer our clients leading edge solutions that are digitally optimised through the following five services which cover the whole lifecycle of their assets: future-shaping strategic consultancy; consultancy and advisory; digital technology solutions; asset optimisation and complex programme delivery. Our culture and values underpin everything we do.
Costain appreciate the time and effort taken when applying for one of our positions but, due to the high volume of responses, we are unable to provide individual feedback on candidates at application phase.
We do share individual feedback following an interview .
A Disability Confident employer will generally offer an interview to any applicant that disclose they have a disability and meets the minimum criteria for the job as defined by the employer.
It is important to note that in certain recruitment situations such as high-volume, seasonal and high-peak times, the employer may wish to limit the overall numbers of interviews offered to both disabled people and non-disabled people.
For more details please go to the Disability Confident website:
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/disability-confident-campaign
IMPORTANT: Before applying for this role, please make sure you have the right to work in the country where the role is based. Unless it clearly stipulates within in the job advert above that the hiring company is looking to or able to sponsor applicants it is deemed that the hiring employer will only consider applications from those able to comply with and work in the country where the role is based.
