WHAT DOES A FINANCE MANAGER DO?
Published: Jun 6, 2025 - The Finance Manager supports collaboration across marketing, engineering, and finance functions to deliver accurate financial reporting, insightful analysis, and strategic forecasting that align with business objectives. This role utilizes data-driven models to guide investment decisions, optimize product development, and shape long-term business performance through effective planning. The manager also focuses on enhancing monetization strategies and improving gross margins through experimentation, cost optimization, and cross-functional initiatives.
A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Finance Manager
1. Finance Manager Duties
- Business Advising: Act as a trusted advisor to the R&C Business, operations, and product teams
- Strategic Planning: Creating their goals and advising where they should be investing to drive automation, productivity, and other improvements across their organization
- Process Automation: Drive standardization and automation of planning and reporting processes across several organizations
- Variance Analysis: Analyze Opex variances with the plan and provide insight to business partners including cost-saving and process improvement recommendations
- Stakeholder Engagement: Partner with Senior Leaders (Senior Managers and Directors) of the R&C business, product and operations to tackle ad-hoc requests
- Program Management: Launching a new program, making trade-off decisions, and driving conversations on Downstream Impacts and Return on Investment
- Financial Support: Support internal customer groups in all finance matters including budgeting, forecasting and financial controls
2. Finance Manager Details
- Product Strategy: Assist in the development of new advertising products by evaluating the business, understanding customer needs and value drivers, and crafting high-impact growth strategies for the business
- Business Partnership: Partner with the Self-Service Advertising business team to anticipate business requirements, trends, and variances
- Performance Tracking: Develop action plans, measure and analyze results
- Growth Initiatives: Identify and drive growth and improvement opportunities
- Metrics Management: Manage financial and operational performance metrics for business, e.g., Weekly Business Reviews
- Financial Governance: Uphold and enforce an environment of ethical practices and strong financial controls
3. Finance Manager Responsibilities
- Financial Planning: Drive financial planning processes related to headcount planning, budgeting, forecasting, and long-range planning
- Stakeholder Partnership: Create partnerships and own relationships with a range of product and business leaders, providing key insights into spend and resource allocation
- Investment Analysis: Build analyses to drive better investment decisions, including a framework to evaluate ROI over the short and long term
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Collaborate cross-functionally with other FP&A groups, as well as operations including purchasing, accounting, and corporate finance
- Process Improvement: Identify and lead initiatives to continuously improve, automate, and scale forecasting and reporting tools, processes, and methodologies
4. Finance Manager Job Summary
- Closing Process: Lead and control the full monthly closing process
- Control Execution: Coordinating and performing all monthly BU control requirements accurately and in time
- Financial Oversight: Controlling, understanding, follow-up and being able to explain the full set of financials
- Budget Analysis: Budget and Cost analysis (yearly BOP, quarterly FCST exercise for RBM Belgium, monthly BOP/FCST variance, Analysis and monthly (raw) material margin reportings…)
- Team Leadership: Team coordination and Internal control mechanisms (a.o. Steer both teams on operational improvements and provide structure to develop more efficient finance reporting
- R&D Reporting: Assisting with the preparation of the RDEC submission
- Data Management: Managing the RDEC tool and ensuring all Research and Development data is correctly sent
- Stakeholder Communication: Liaising with key stakeholders including the businesses, IT, EFSC’s and the Tax Department
- Business Closure: Assist in the management and closure of discontinued businesses, which will involve working with the Governance Team, Central and Group Finance
- Project Support: Assisting with ad hoc projects to support the business in finance and/or cross-functional business process improvement teams
5. Finance Manager Accountabilities
- Team Oversight: Overseeing the day-to-day operations of the Finance Team
- Management Reporting: Preparing monthly management accounts for presentation to the Board of Directors
- Budget Preparation: Assisting with the preparation of budgets and forecasts
- Cost Control: Managing the Cost Control System
- Payment Reconciliation: Liaising with the Fraud and Payments and Product Payment Team on PSP reconciliations
- Cash Management: Administering the cash management of the group
- Supplier Payments: Managing payments to suppliers
- Financial Recommendations: Recommending financial actions by analyzing accounting options
- Financial Analysis: Preparing ad hoc financial analysis
- Audit Coordination: Coordinating with auditors and preparing all information required for the audit
- Team Development: Analyzing the training and development needs of the team
6. Finance Manager Functions
- Finance Leadership: Be an instrumental leader in building finance and accounting in a global, hyper-growth environment
- Strategic Oversight: Provide financial perspective, accountability and strategic oversight of the Corporate FP&A team
- Global Scaling: Supporting a business that is scaling globally with high innovation and capital requirements
- Decision Support: Apply business judgment and financial insights to assist with decision-making across product launches, city operations, and vehicle development
- System Development: Build and leverage financial planning systems for budgeting and forecasting
- Stakeholder Partnership: Proactively partner with cross-functional stakeholders to identify financial drivers and maintain the highest level of data quality
- Financial Modeling: Build sophisticated, in-depth financial models from scratch
- Reporting Alignment: Work closely with accounting to provide input on management reporting needs and to better understand actuals
7. Finance Manager Job Description
- Business Planning: Cover financial planning and business development for Disney Consumables and provide support for Softline categories
- Strategic Analysis: Providing high-quality strategic and financial analyses as well as decision support on new business initiatives
- Financial Support: Plays an integral role in supporting the short-term and long-term financial success of Disney's products business
- Budget Management: Manage the financial planning process of licensing for the client group, including annual budget, quarterly forecasts and accruals, by coordinating with category, licensee, finance, IT and executives
- Executive Reporting: Develop licensee overview decks for senior management
- Management Presentation: Prepare consolidation, summary, and presentation decks for management review
- Variance Analysis: Utilize system tools (Cognos, InVision) to develop analysis, identify variances and present to senior management
- Process Optimization: Improve operational efficiency by streamlining processes and enhancing the effectiveness of reporting
- Contract Oversight: Main finance stakeholder for client group in deal approval and operational initiatives, participates in contract negotiation and ensures contracts are aligned with DPEP strategic initiatives
- Deal Evaluation: Provide analysis and develop recommendations on contract terms for major deal negotiation including RR, MG, CMF, promo, etc.
- Modeling Support: Conduct financial modeling to support operational initiatives (including transfer fee, letter of credit, guarantee shortfall, royalty rate change, blitz items, licensee rationalization, etc.)
- Contract Coordination: Coordinate with CMC, legal and credit to drive efficient contract execution and work with accounting to ensure accurate royalty reporting and resolve issues
- Strategic Planning: Support the management team in developing a long-term strategic plan
- Industry Research: Conduct industry research and track industry trends using a variety of research resources
- Initiative Implementation: Identify and assist in the implementation of strategic initiatives in conjunction with franchise /category/ retail management, by performing such analyses as ROI, market sizing, benchmarking, value chain, market deep dive, etc.
- Scenario Modeling: Develop financial models to analyze outcomes of various initiatives to help determine the best approach
- Opportunity Identification: Identify and explore new business opportunities for the client group
8. Finance Manager Overview
- Expense Processing: Process expense claims in Xero and CMAP and arrange payment
- Payroll Onboarding: Payroll induction for new starters
- Payroll Management: Collate payroll data, enter on payroll portal, liaise with payroll agency and check figures
- External Liaison: First point of contact for the Bank and the external Accountant
- Invoice Entry: Entering purchase invoice in Xero and project expenses in both Xero and CMAP
- Sales Invoicing: Raising sales invoices in Xero and CMAP for projects and credit control
- Pension Administration: Administer company pension and reconcile corporate credit cards
- Bank Reconciliation: Update banking and reconcile bank accounts
- VAT Reporting: Prepare, reconcile and file Quarterly VAT return, including arranging payment
- Project Coordination: Liaise with Project Teams over billing, payment schedules
- Document Filing: Filing of financial correspondence
- Cash Forecasting: Prepare a monthly Cash flow Forecast in consultation with the Practice Manager
- P&L Reporting: Prepare P&L figures and commentary for the quarterly report
- Year-End Preparation: Prepare Year-End Accounts for the external accountant and liaise thereafter over amendments
- Tax Compliance: Validate the calculation, submission and payment of corporate tax return
- Salary Analysis: Preparing figures for salary reviews
9. Finance Manager Details and Accountabilities
- Financial Visibility: Provides visibility into AMEX’s past and future financial performance and drives decisions that enable the Company to achieve its stated financial objectives
- Business Planning: Leads, coordinates and executes the key business–planning processes and related analytics across American Express
- Process Improvement: Focuses on process improvement through technology and best practices
- Decision Support: Plays a key role in driving decisions for AMEX through leadership and financial analysis to all of the revenue-generating business units and key operational groups at AMEX
- Global Collaboration: Collaborates globally to deliver expert accounting, reporting and advisory services, and financial risk control and governance, while supporting business growth and protecting shareholder value
- Capital Management: Leads AMEX's capital assessment processes and manages the capital distribution strategies through dividends and share repurchases and liquidity to ensure that cash is in the right place, in the right currency, at the right time
- Strategic Execution: Executes strategically relevant and financially sound transactions that enhance profitability, supplement growth, and optimize AMEX’s use of capital
- Strategic Partnership: Partners at the corporate and business unit levels to drive strategic growth
- Investor Communication: Provides the investment community with information about AMEX's strategies, objectives and performance
10. Finance Manager Tasks
- Stakeholder Collaboration: Working with a wide variety of marketing and engineering stakeholders
- Decision Frameworks: Helping to optimize decision-making frameworks around providing world-class experiences for users while being fiscally responsible and striving to exceed their business goals
- Financial Coordination: Working with other fantastic finance teams at Microsoft to ensure accurate financials for close, forecast, and long-range strategic plans
- Cross-Functional Influence: Influence a wide variety of stakeholders across functions (engineering, finance, and marketing) and levels of seniority to drive the business forward, every day, with driver-based storytelling that adapts to the audience
- Financial Management: Manage the financial health of the business with reliable close reporting, insightful analysis, and accurate forecasting for the current year
- Target Setting: Articulate and frame the future shape of the business through cross-team efforts to drive target setting and budgeting for the next fiscal year
- Model Development: Develop data-driven models to inform product roadmap and investment decisions to maximize return on investment (ROI) for Microsoft’s Office Consumer business
- Revenue Optimization: Bring curiosity every day to identify ways can improve monetization in ways big (new releases) and small (A/B testing and experimentation) and hold the business accountable for results
- Cost Reduction: Partner with the engineering and cost of goods sold (COGS) Finance teams to find opportunities to reduce costs and increase gross margin while continuing to offer best-in-class services to consumers