Financial Planning Analyst

Roles and Responsibilities:

Support Group FP&A in delivering high-quality performance reporting, forecasting, budgeting, and business planning across the Group's portfolio of resorts and corporate functions.

The role owns the structured groundwork behind Group FP&A outputs: consolidated inputs, clean trackers, reconciled data, first-draft commentary, forecast coordination, and practical analysis that helps explain performance and support decision-making.

This is a hands-on role with direct exposure to Group performance, multi-resort operations, senior stakeholders, and business planning. It suits someone who wants to move beyond pure analysis into ownership of recurring outputs, performance narratives, process improvement, and value-added insight.

The role will also support the evolution of FP&A ways of working, including better use of ERP data, BI tools, reusable templates, automation, and AI-enabled analysis to reduce manual effort and improve the quality, speed, and consistency of reporting and planning.

Key Responsibilities

1. Performance Reporting

· Prepare monthly reporting packs including CFO reports, internal management reports, resort performance reviews, and other Group FP&A outputs.

· Consolidate inputs from resorts, corporate finance, commercial, operations, and other functions, ensuring consistency, completeness, and accuracy across all outputs.

· Draft clear commentary on revenue, EBITDA, GOP, cash flow, and key drivers, ready for review by the Head of FP&A.

· Maintain core performance trackers covering actuals, pacing, forecast, risks, actions, and key operational KPIs.

· Reconcile reporting outputs against ERP, BI, and operational data, investigating and resolving variances at source.

· Support the standardisation of reporting formats, templates, definitions, and timelines across resorts and corporate functions.

· Ensure recurring reports are not just produced, but improved over time in terms of accuracy, clarity, usability, and business relevance.

2. Forecasting, Budgeting & Business Planning

· Work with the Head of FP&A to help design and improve the Group budget process, including the budget model, submission structure, review cadence, and reporting outputs.

· Support 5-year business planning, long-range forecasting, scenario modelling, and sensitivity analysis.

· Support the annual budgeting process end to end, including planning calendars, input templates, budget models, review decks, review sessions, and final consolidation.

· Run the monthly forecast cycle, coordinating timelines, templates, assumptions, submissions, reviews, and consolidation.

· Build and maintain forecasting and budgeting models that are structured, scalable, and easy to update.

· Track actuals versus budget, prior forecast, and prior year, highlighting key variances, trends, risks, and opportunities.

· Coordinate with resort finance and operational teams to ensure planning assumptions are realistic, clearly documented, and aligned with business priorities.

3. Analysis & Insight

· Analyse performance drivers across the portfolio, including occupancy, ADR, RevPAR, segment mix, ancillary revenue, payroll, departmental costs, GOP flow-through, EBITDA, and cash flow.

· Provide concise, action-oriented insights that explain what is happening, why it is happening, and what management should focus on.

· Support operational analysis at departmental P&L level, identifying cost pressures, margin trends, productivity issues, and opportunities for improvement.

· Develop analysis beyond core FP&A reporting, including Sales & Marketing trackers, channel performance, commercial productivity, cost efficiency, capex tracking, and other business-critical areas.

· Identify gaps in current analysis, including areas where the business is not yet tracking the right metrics or asking the right questions.

· Support ad-hoc analysis for senior stakeholders, including scenario analysis, investment cases, owner updates, board materials, and management presentations.

4. Process, Systems & Continuous Improvement

· Identify weak points in current reporting, forecasting, budgeting, and data workflows, and propose practical improvements.

· Map value-add versus non-value-add activities within FP&A processes, with the aim of reducing manual work and increasing time spent on analysis and decision support.

· Build reusable templates, trackers, models, and tools that improve speed, accuracy, consistency, and accountability.

· Support better integration between resorts, Group FP&A, ERP systems, BI tools, and reporting outputs.

· Support the transition of resort reporting and finance processes into Business Central or other Group systems where applicable.

· Work with finance, operations, commercial, and systems teams to improve data quality, reporting definitions, and single-source-of-truth discipline.

5. AI, Automation & Future FP&A Capability

· Support the practical use of AI and automation within FP&A processes, focusing on real pain points rather than theoretical use cases.

· Identify opportunities to use AI tools for variance explanation, commentary drafting, data validation, trend detection, reporting checklists, and workflow follow-up.

· Help develop AI-assisted templates, prompts, trackers, and review routines that improve the speed and consistency of FP&A deliverables.

· Maintain strong control and review discipline, ensuring AI-supported outputs are validated, explainable, and aligned with finance standards.

Candidate Profile

· 3 to 5 years of experience in FP&A, commercial finance, business analysis, corporate finance, or consulting.

· Hospitality, leisure, real estate, multi-unit, or asset-heavy experience are strongly preferred.

· Hands-on experience across monthly reporting, forecasting, budgeting, variance analysis, and management presentations.

· Able to interpret performance data independently and produce a clear point of view, not just a summary of numbers.

· Strong analytical discipline with the ability to reconcile data, investigate variances, challenge assumptions, and close issues at source.

· Comfortable working with imperfect inputs, tight deadlines, and multiple stakeholders.

· Strong written communication, with the ability to produce clear commentary, slides, trackers, and short management notes with minimal direction.

· Curious about the business, not just the numbers; interested in understanding resort operations, commercial drivers, departmental performance, and management priorities.

· Practical improvement mindset, with the ability to spot pain points and build simple tools or processes to fix them.

Technical Skills

· Advanced Excel, including financial modelling, pivots, lookups, structured data handling, Power Query, and Power Pivot.

· Strong PowerPoint skills, including executive-ready slide structuring, clear logic, clean layouts, and concise messaging.

· ERP exposure, preferably Business Central, Sun, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, or similar systems.

· Working knowledge of BI tools such as Power BI, Tableau, Avalon, or similar platforms.

· Strong understanding of financial statements, management reporting, budgeting, forecasting, and variance analysis.

· Good understanding of hospitality KPIs including occupancy, ADR, RevPAR, GOP, EBITDA, segment mix, flow-through, and ancillary revenue.

· SQL, basic data querying, or experience working with databases is an advantage.

· Experience using AI tools for analysis, reporting, commentary, automation, or productivity improvement is an advantage.