Assistant Finance Manager: Data, Reporting and Systems

Are you ready to turn financial data into meaningful insight?

This is an excellent opportunity to develop your career as an Assistant Finance Manager within a corporate setting at the heart of the Scottish Government, with a specific focus on making the most of corporate data, reporting and systems to enable financial insights and decision making across the organisation.

As an assistant finance manager within the small Corporate Reporting team, you’ll use your analytical, technical and data capabilities to produce a range of reports and applications, supporting Corporate Finance processes and managing outputs for consumption by the wider organisation.

Reporting to a Senior Finance Manager, this is a key role which requires a combination of financial skills alongside detailed technical knowledge of data handling tools and processes, business intelligence, and familiarity with the Oracle finance suite and underpinning data/metadata structures.

You will work with a degree of independence to manage both data refresh of existing tools as well as enhancements and new developments, requiring highly effective analytical capabilities and strong organisation and prioritisation skills. You’ll also need to be able to communicate in a non-technical manner with a wide range of stakeholders across the Scottish Government to enable them to adopt best practice, and use financial reporting outputs effectively, managing feedback and enhancement pipelines to support ongoing improvement.

You’ll be joining an innovative, forward-looking division with a vision to apply global best practice, and a commitment to support all staff to grow their professional knowledge, skills, and experience.

This is a technical role within the finance profession. While it does not require you to hold a professional accountancy qualification, the successful candidate may be part qualified or be willing to work towards qualification. Full support for this will be provided as appropriate.

Responsibilities

• Maintain and develop repeatable processes for Enterprise Resource Management (EPM) financial reporting outputs, including managing the timetable for data refresh and associated data dependencies where those outputs are generated external to the EPM system.
• Ensuring alignment of Corporate Finance dashboards and reports with SG policies and best practice on hosting and sharing Power BI dashboards and related resources.
• Build and maintain the Power BI security model and manage ad-hoc access requests and queries, ensuring data is secure and that only the relevant data is shared with the appropriate audiences.
• Manage associated guidance and training materials, and support communications with stakeholders/Q&A sessions and other engagement.
• Support continuous improvement by developing improvement recommendations, including managing and triaging stakeholder feedback, and liaising with Corporate Finance colleagues on prioritisation.
• Develop effective reporting solutions using Power BI and native Oracle reporting functionalities based on a strong understanding of EPM data, Scottish Government Chart of Accounts and related data structures, leveraging relevant emerging technologies including Automations or AI.
• Use reporting tools and data interrogation to identify data issues, in particular quality assurance of EPM outputs for dashboards and reports, and recommend solutions or controls to address these, in conjunction with wider Finance and Oracle system management colleagues as appropriate.
• Support continuous improvement of Corporate Finance off system processes and reporting, including process, formulaic or VBA macro based developments or improvements to existing and future Excel or other MS Office dependent activities.
• Support testing of new EPM releases by verifying accuracy and consistency of current and future reporting outputs and liaise with project team to support relevant defect resolution and re-testing.

Success profile

Success profiles are specific to each job and they include the mix of behaviours, experience and technical criteria (if applicable) that candidates will be assessed on. The Success Profile will include the Professional / Technical skills, Experience and Behaviours.

Technical / Professional Skills:

• Budgeting, Forecasting and Costing - Working
• Working with Data in Systems - Practitioner
• Working with Data in Finance - Practitioner

You can find out more about the skills required here: Finance profession

Experience

• Experience working with Power BI in a corporate finance context, owning the end-to-end lifecycle from requirements gathering through build, testing, publication and iteration, and maintaining a business-as-usual data refresh pipeline and security model.
• Experience producing outputs in the form of reports and data visualisations so that financial data can be used effectively to support evidence based decision making, leveraging your knowledge of Scottish Government corporate finance data and metadata structures.
• Advanced Excel/VBA experience, such as building and maintaining applications to support/automate the management and processing of data.

Behaviours:

• Making Effective Decisions (Level 3)
• Changing and Improving (Level 3)
• Communicating and Influencing (Level 3)

Find out more about Success Profiles.

How to apply

Apply online, providing a CV and supporting statement (of no more than 1000 words) providing evidence of how you meet the behaviours, experience and technical skills listed in the Success Profile above. Both the CV and the supporting statement provided will be assessed against the criteria for the role.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools can be used to support your application, but all statements and examples provided must be truthful, factually accurate and taken directly from your own experience. Where plagiarism has been identified (presenting the ideas and experiences of others, or generated by artificial intelligence, and presented as your own) applications will be withdrawn and internal candidates may be subject to disciplinary action.

Please see our candidate guidance for more information on acceptable and unacceptable uses of AI in recruitment.

If invited for further assessment, this will consist of an interview and another form of assessment. Assessments are scheduled for w/c 23 November if possible, however this may be subject to change.

Recruitment Principles

As a government organisation, we adhere to the Civil Service Commission Recruitment Principles and we investigate any complaints received in relation to recruitment cases.

About us

The Scottish Government is the devolved government for Scotland. We have responsibility for a wide range of key policy areas including: education, health, the economy, justice, housing and transport. We offer rewarding careers and employ people across Scotland in a wide range of professions and roles.

Our staff are part of the UK Civil Service, observing the Civil Service Code and working for Ministers and senior stakeholders to deliver vital public services which improve the lives of the people of Scotland.

We offer a supportive and inclusive working environment along with a wide range of employee benefits. Find out more about what we offer.

As part of the UK Civil Service, we uphold the Civil Service Nationality Rules.

Working pattern

Our standard hours are 35 hours per week and we offer a range of flexible working options depending on the needs of the role, including Flexi-leave. Scottish Government staff in hybrid-compatible roles should aim to work in-person 40% of the time, either in an office or other agreed work location. If you have specific questions about the role you are applying for, please contact us.

Skilled Worker Sponsorship not being offered

Skilled Worker sponsorship is not available for this role. As a result, we are unable to appoint candidates who require Skilled Worker sponsorship now or in the future. Applicants must have an existing and ongoing right to work in the UK.

Security checks

Successful candidates must complete the Baseline Personnel Security Standard (BPSS), before they can be appointed. BPSS is comprised of four main pre-employment checks – Identity, Right to work, Employment History and a Criminal Record check (unspent convictions).

You can find out more about BPSS on the UK Government website, and read about the Government Vetting Charter, or about all the different levels of security checks in our Candidate Guide.

Internal candidates may need to gain higher security clearance than they currently hold if successful in their application.

Equality statement

We are committed to equality and inclusion and we aim to recruit a diverse workforce that reflects the population of our nation.

Find out more about our commitment to diversity and how we offer and support recruitment adjustments for anyone who needs them.

Further information

Find out more about our organisation, what we offer staff members and how to apply on our Careers Website.

Read our Candidate Guide for further information on our recruitment and application processes.

This post is open to Internal Scottish Government candidates and Common Citizenship organisations only. Apply before 23:59 - 11/11/26