About the Role
To act as a strategic finance partner to retail store operations, driving commercial performance through insightful analysis and proactive support on sales and payroll. This role ensures stores are optimising revenue, managing labour effectively, and delivering against financial targets while maintaining operational excellence.
Key Responsibilities
* Partner with regional and store managers to drive sales performance against budget and forecast, providing actionable insight on trends, like-for-like performance, and product/category results, while identifying risks and opportunities and supporting corrective actions.
* Challenge assumptions, support target setting and forecasting, and translate financial data into clear operational actions for store teams.
* Own and deliver payroll budgets across the store estate, analysing labour metrics (e.g. labour % to sales, hours vs demand, productivity), optimising scheduling and rotas, and balancing service levels with cost control.
* Provide guidance on labour planning aligned to sales demand, highlighting risks such as overspend or under-resourcing.
* Lead store-level input into annual budgets and rolling forecasts, ensuring alignment between sales plans and payroll investment, building realistic data-driven assumptions, and supporting scenario planning (including peak trading, promotions, and cost pressures).
* Deliver clear, concise reporting for store performance reviews and regional leadership meetings, establishing KPIs and performance dashboards, ensuring financial discipline, and supporting governance with accurate and timely data.
* Build strong relationships with store managers, regional teams, and retail operations, acting as a trusted advisor, influencing decision-making, and coaching non-finance stakeholders to improve financial understanding.
* Identify opportunities to improve reporting, labour planning, and sales performance tracking, simplifying financial information and supporting implementation of tools and systems.
Person Specification
Key Measures of Success
* Delivery of sales targets, payroll control within budget while maintaining service levels, improved labour productivity, high-quality actionable insight, positive stakeholder engagement, and accurate forecasting versus actuals.
Key Skills & Experience
* Strong commercial finance background (retail or multi-site preferred), sound understanding of sales drivers and labour economics, ability to convert data into actionable insight, strong stakeholder management and influencing skills, experience partnering with operational teams, and strong Excel/data analysis skills (BI tools beneficial).
Key Behaviours
* Commercially curious and proactive, constructively challenges assumptions, simplifies complexity for operational teams, balances cost control with customer and sales impact, and builds trust with frontline stakeholders.
What We Offer
* Competitive salary, pension, long service awards, employee discount, and cycle to work scheme.
Additional Information
* Position: Permanent, Full-time
* Hours: Monday – Friday, 08:45am – 17:30pm
* Location: Plymouth, Devon