Finance Business Partner at InPost UK in Edinburgh, Scotland, GB

Want to be part of a UK hub, in a global business that is scaling rapidly, evolving fast and radically changing the decades-old delivery universe? If so, read on — we're looking for a Finance Business Partner to join our Controlling team and become a trusted financial partner to one of our key business areas.

Our mission? To switch up the status quo and become the UK’s leading out-of-home business. With a fast-growing network of thousands of smart lockers, hundreds of leading retail partners and the launch of our transformative Send service, we’re bringing freedom to anyone with a parcel.

At InPost UK, we’re building an unparalleled group of talent that’s committed to help us power our mission to reshape the way parcels move, and redefine eCommerce logistics. Our team is packed full of top-notch experts in e-commerce, technology, scale-up growth, sustainability, logistics and supply chain. We’re a passionate bunch with high ambition – we collaborate, innovate, support each other, and leave egos at the door.

About the role:

This is a commercially focused finance role within the Controlling function. The Finance Business Partner is embedded in a specific area of the UK&I business — which may be Network, Commercial, Pricing, Operations, Newstrade or another function depending on team structure — acting as the primary Finance presence for that area. The role is equally outward-facing and inward-facing: outward to the business leaders and budget holders who rely on clear financial insight to make better decisions, and inward to the Financial Accounting team whose ledger outputs underpin everything the FBP produces. It is a role for someone who is commercially curious, analytically rigorous and confident enough to challenge as well as support.

What you’ll be doing:

Finance Business Partnering

• Act as the primary Finance contact for your assigned business area — building a close, trusted relationship with the relevant Director, Head of Function and their leadership team, and positioning Finance as an indispensable partner to how decisions are made in that part of the business.

• Attend leadership and management meetings for your business area — contributing financial perspective in real time, providing challenge where assumptions are stretched or risks are underweighted, and ensuring commercial decisions are made with a clear understanding of their financial consequences.

• Develop a genuine understanding of the commercial and operational drivers of your business area — going beyond the numbers to understand how the business works, what matters to the people you partner, and what the financial data is really telling them.

• Act as a proactive financial adviser rather than a reactive reporter — identifying financial risks and opportunities within your area before they surface in the management accounts, and bringing them to the attention of your business partners and the relevant Head of Finance with clear analysis and recommended actions.

• Support your business area in building financial literacy and cost accountability — helping non-finance leaders understand their numbers, take ownership of variances, and manage their P&L with confidence rather than relying on Finance to interpret everything for them.

Monthly Performance Reporting & Commentary

• Own the production of the monthly financial reporting pack for your assigned business area — ensuring actuals are accurate, variance commentary is insightful and the output gives business leaders a clear, timely picture of performance against plan.

• Write variance commentary that explains rather than describes — going beyond identifying that a number has moved to understanding why it has moved, what it means for the full-year position and what action is or should be being taken.

• Ensure reporting outputs are consistent with the consolidated UK&I management accounts — working with the relevant Head of Finance and other Finance Business Partners to ensure the overall picture is coherent and that intra-business movements are properly explained.

• Continuously improve the quality, relevance and speed of management reporting for your business area — identifying where reports can be made more actionable, where automation can reduce production time, and where new metrics would better serve the business.

Budgeting, Forecasting & Financial Planning

• Own the budget and re-forecast process for your assigned business area — working with budget holders to build robust, well-evidenced plans from the bottom up, challenging assumptions that lack rigour, and ensuring the final plan is deliverable and clearly explained to both the business and the relevant Head of Finance.

• Lead rolling forecast updates for your area throughout the year — maintaining an accurate and current view of the full-year financial outlook, ensuring any material changes to forecast are identified, explained and escalated promptly, and that the forward-looking picture reflects what the business genuinely expects to happen rather than what was planned.

• Provide financial modelling and scenario analysis to support decision-making in your business area — including investment cases, pricing proposals, volume scenario analysis, cost lever evaluation and any other financial modelling required to support commercial or operational decisions.

• Contribute to the UK five-year plan (5YP) for your area — working with your business stakeholders to develop a credible, commercially grounded multi-year financial view that is consistent with the overall UK&I strategic plan.

Working with the Financial Accounting Team

• Build and maintain a strong, collaborative day-to-day working relationship with the Financial Controllers — understanding the accounting basis of the numbers you report, and ensuring that any differences between ledger actuals and management reporting are understood, explained and resolved.

• Provide the Financial Controllers with timely, clear context on business events that will affect the close — including material accruals, one-off items, recharges, timing differences or any other events that should be reflected in the month-end ledger — ensuring the accounting team is never surprised by what the management accounts show.

• Work with the Financial Controllers and Head of Financial Accounting to agree and maintain a clear close governance framework for your area — including cut-off rules, accrual methodologies, inter-entity recharge bases and cost allocation approaches — so that the transition from locked ledger to management commentary is seamless and low-friction.

• Act as the bridge between the business and the Financial Accounting team — translating commercial events into accounting requirements for the Financial Controllers, and translating accounting outputs into business-relevant insight for your stakeholders. The quality of this interface is a direct determinant of the quality of management reporting.

• Participate in joint Financial Accounting and Controlling team meetings, close reviews and planning sessions — contributing a business-facing perspective to ledger governance decisions and ensuring the two functions operate as a single, well-integrated Finance team rather than two separate functions that happen to produce related outputs.

Investment Appraisal & Business Cases

• Support your business area in the preparation of investment and business cases for MCA (Major Capital or Contract Approval) or other governance submissions — providing independent financial evaluation, challenging the robustness of assumptions, and ensuring the financial case is clearly presented and properly supported.

• Build financial models for investment proposals that are rigorous, well-documented and clearly structured — covering P&L impact, cash flow, payback period, NPV/IRR where relevant, and sensitivity analysis around the key assumptions.

• Conduct post-implementation reviews on significant investment decisions approved for your area — assessing whether projected benefits have been delivered and feeding lessons learned back into the investment appraisal process.

Cost Management

• Support budget holders in your business area in actively managing their cost base — providing granular cost centre/department analysis, identifying cost lines that are running ahead of plan, and helping to develop and track cost reduction or efficiency improvement plans.

• Provide regular cost performance analysis to your business stakeholders — going beyond summarising actuals to helping them understand which cost lines are truly controllable in-period and where structural change is needed to deliver a sustainable improvement.

Commercial Analytics & Decision Support

• Produce ad hoc financial analysis and commercial insight to support decision-making in your business area — whether that is a pricing sensitivity analysis, a volume-mix-margin bridge or a profitability assessment — bringing structured financial thinking to commercial questions that might otherwise be decided on instinct alone.

• Develop and maintain a set of financial and commercial KPIs for your business area that go beyond standard P&L reporting — providing the business with leading indicators, efficiency metrics and trend data that enable proactive management rather than retrospective review.

• Use data visualisation and reporting tools (Power BI, advanced Excel or equivalent) to present financial insight in a way that is accessible and engaging for non-finance audiences — prioritising clarity and actionability over technical complexity.

What we need from you:

We’re looking for people who are ready for a fast paced environment, get their kicks out of problem solving and can balance getting today's stuff done, whilst building for the future. We’re looking for people with drive and natural curiosity – who want to do things differently. And do them brilliantly.

Qualifications & Experience

• Qualified accountant (ACA, ACCA, CIMA or equivalent) with post-qualification experience in a finance business partnering, management accounting or commercial finance role — with a track record of working directly with senior operational or commercial stakeholders.

• Demonstrable experience of owning a business area's financial reporting, budgeting and forecasting process end to end — producing outputs independently, to timetable and to a standard that genuinely informs decision-making rather than simply satisfying a reporting obligation.

• Experience of financial modelling and investment appraisal — comfortable building scenario models in Excel, challenging the assumptions behind a business case and communicating financial analysis clearly to a non-finance audience.

• Prior experience in a multi-entity, high-volume operational business — logistics, distribution, e-commerce, retail or similar — is highly desirable. Candidates who have partnered both an operational and a commercial business area will be particularly well-suited to the breadth of FBP roles available.

• Familiarity with management reporting and planning tools — Power BI, Anaplan, Adaptive or similar — is an advantage; advanced Excel and the ability to automate or improve reporting processes is expected at this level.

Skills & Competencies

• Commercially sharp — connects financial data to the commercial and operational context of the business quickly, identifies what the numbers are really saying and frames insight in a way that prompts action rather than passive acknowledgement.

• Credible and confident — builds trusted relationships with senior business leaders, asks incisive questions, challenges constructively and is comfortable delivering financial messages that are not always welcome.

• Analytically rigorous — builds robust models and analysis, doesn't round off complexity prematurely, and is precise and transparent about the assumptions underpinning financial forecasts and business cases.

• An excellent communicator — presents financial performance clearly and compellingly to non-finance audiences, writes commentary that is insightful rather than descriptive, and adapts style and register to the audience.

• Genuinely collaborative with the accounting team — understands that the FBP role is only as good as the ledger it works from, actively cultivates the relationship with the Financial Controller, and treats the accounting-to-controlling interface as a shared responsibility rather than someone else's problem.

• Organised and deadline-driven — manages the month-end, forecast and budget cycle simultaneously without losing quality in any area, and plans ahead rather than reacting to the calendar.

• Curious and proactive — stays close to the business, asks questions about what is changing, and surfaces financial implications early rather than waiting for the management accounts to tell the story.

• Resilient under pressure — maintains accuracy and composure during the demanding periods of the financial calendar, and remains solution-focused when priorities conflict or the data is incomplete.

The InPost process:

We pride ourselves on our candidate experience. We want to make this as straightforward as possible, for you and for us! We will try our best to get back to you within a few days to let you know if we’d like to take you to the first stage. This normally involves a 20 minute chat with our Talent Team. If we both feel the connection, you’ll then go through another one or two stages, depending on the level of the role.

At InPost, we love uniqueness. Our strength is our people.

We strive to create an open, equal, inclusive environment in which everyone has the opportunity to flourish and be themselves.