Finance Business Partner
InPost UK · Edinburgh, United Kingdom · hybrid
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.
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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