Senior FP&A Analyst | IFS Copperleaf Staines-upon-Thames, England, United Kingdom Finance
- staines upon thames, england, United Kingdom
- Permanent·On-site
- Full time
- £60 - £90 Per Hour
Job Description
IFS is a billion-dollar revenue company with 7000+ employees on all continents. Our leading AI technology is the backbone of our award-winning enterprise software solutions, enabling our customers to be their best when it really matters–at the Moment of Service™. Our commitment to internal AI adoption has allowed us to stay at the forefront of technological advancements, ensuring our colleagues can unlock their creativity and productivity, and our solutions are always cutting‑edge.
At IFS, we’re flexible, we’re innovative, and we’re focused not only on how we can engage with our customers but on how we can make a real change and have a worldwide impact. We help solve some of society’s greatest challenges, fostering a better future through our agility, collaboration, and trust.
We celebrate diversity and understand our responsibility to reflect the diverse world we work in. We are committed to promoting an inclusive workforce that fully represents the many different cultures, backgrounds, and viewpoints of our customers, our partners, and our communities. As a truly international company serving people from around the globe, we realize that our success is tantamount to the respect we have for those different points of view.
By joining our team, you will have the opportunity to be part of a global, diverse environment; you will be joining a winning team with a commitment to sustainability; and a company where we get things done so that you can make a positive impact on the world.
We’re looking for innovative and original thinkers to work in an environment where you can #MakeYourMoment so that we can help others make theirs.
If you want to change the status quo, we’ll help you make your moment. Join Team Purple. Join IFS.
Job Description
About the Role
We are looking for an Senior FP&A Analyst to join the IFS Copperleaf finance team, based in the UK. You will be one of five in a close-knit, high‑calibre FP&A team, working together on the forecast, planning and reporting cycle while owning your own areas of forecasting, performance reporting and commercial analysis.
The rest of the team is based in Vancouver, so this role carries the European day. You will be the FP&A point of contact for stakeholders across the UK and Europe, working autonomously while your colleagues are offline and handing over cleanly across time zones. As one of the senior members of the team, you will be someone we can look to when the Director, FP&A is not in the room.
The value of this role is not in producing the numbers, it is in explaining them. We need someone with real commercial awareness who can see the bigger picture, get to the insight behind the movement and put a clear recommendation in front of decision‑makers. You will act as a trusted finance business partner, working cross‑functionally with leaders across the business, and will mentor and develop junior members of the FP&A team.
This is also a data‑forward role. Copperleaf is a fast‑paced, high‑growth business and we expect this role to be fluent with data - comfortable querying source systems directly, building production reporting in the Power Platform, and using AI and agentic workflows to shorten the distance between question and answer. We want someone with the tenacity to keep finding improvements in efficiency, quality and capability, and the toolset and appetite to build them rather than wait for them.
Key Responsibilities
Commercial Insight and Business Partnering
- Act as a trusted finance business partner to leaders across the business - understand their drivers, challenge assumptions and hold the business to its numbers.
- Explain performance rather than report it: connect movements in revenue, cost, headcount and KPIs to what is actually happening commercially, and set out what it means.
- Provide the analysis behind investment cases, pricing decisions and strategic initiatives, with a clear recommendation attached.
- Be the FP&A presence through the European day - the point of contact for UK and European stakeholders while the Vancouver‑based team is offline.
- Be a senior voice in the team - sharpening the work of others, representing FP&A with senior stakeholders and picking things up when the Director, FP&A is unavailable.
Forecasting and Planning
- Play a leading role in the monthly and quarterly forecast cycle - owning your inputs, assumptions and commentary, and working with the team to land the submission.
- Build and maintain the models that underpin the plan: recurring revenue and backlog, ARR and ACV, churn and retention, cost, headcount and long‑range planning.
- Support the annual planning process, bringing a clear view of where the risks and opportunities sit.
Reporting and Analysis
- Own the management reporting and dashboards that leaders use to run the business, with a narrative attached to every pack.
- Analyse variances, trends, risks and opportunities across revenue, operating expenses, headcount and KPIs.
- Partner with Accounting to ensure results are reported accurately and consistently.
Data, Automation and AI
- Get to the data at source - write and maintain queries against finance and operational data sets rather than waiting on manual extracts.
- Build and maintain automated reporting across the Microsoft Power Platform (Power Query, Power BI, Power Automate).
- Design and build agentic workflows that remove manual effort from the reporting and forecast cycle and increase our speed to insight.
- Use AI routinely in day‑to‑day analysis and raise the data and AI capability of the wider FP&A team.
- Bring a continuous improvement mindset - actively look for opportunities to improve efficiency, quality and capability, and see them through to delivery.
Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Finance, Accounting, Economics or a related field, or a qualified / part-qualified accountant (ACA, ACCA, CIMA).
- 4-6 years of progressive FP&A, financial analysis or strategic finance experience.
- Strong commercial acumen, with a track record of influencing decisions rather than only producing analysis.
- Advanced Excel and financial modelling, with a solid grounding in accounting principles and the financial statements.
- Demonstrable experience working with large data sets and advanced data querying - SQL, Power Query / M or equivalent. You should be comfortable getting to the data yourself.
- Hands‑on experience with the Microsoft Power