Luke Smith ACMA, CGMA

Working 2nd to Head of FP&A, managing analyst and responsible for regular forecasting, analysis and insights. Converting detailed analysis from analysts & business partners into clear stories and actionable insights.

• Leading monthly rolling forecast cycles, including analysis on actuals, variance analysis, drivers and risks & opportunities.
• Planning and leading annual budget process and long range forecasts, liaising with business stakeholders to ensure timelines are met and challenging all inputs.
• Management and improvement of financial models and reports.
• Producing monthly board reporting and commercial committee packs.
• Management of risk and opportunity schedules for monthly forecasting and annual budgeting.
• Improving FP&A and finance processes to improve efficiency and accuracy of reporting, including implementing PowerQuery for consolidation processes.
• Recruitment and management of finance analyst, with oversight of sales reporting on PowerBI.

Full finance responsibility for multiple creative agencies, overseeing end to end finance processes with management of management accounts and finance assistants.

• Leading delivery of budgets, forecasts and cashflows. This includes annual budgets and 3/5 year plans.
• Lead monthly reporting presentations for managing directors, finance directors and other group stakeholders.
• Business partnering to Managing Directors, Sales and Operations. Ensuring business units understand their financial targets and tracking performance. Making recommendations to improve financial performance and profitability.
• Presenting monthly financial results and analysis to both financial and non-financial senior stakeholders.
• Providing finance input on studio commercials such as client profitability and project pricing.
• Management of cashflow reporting and submission to group.

Broad finance role reporting to FD, with exposure across management accounts, FP&A, commercial, statutory accounts and audit.

• Leading full annual budget process and reforecasts for EMEA & APAC locations while managing deadlines for Americas to produce consolidated results and analysis.
• Built dynamic forecasting models to enable quick and accurate updates to reforecast P&L in an unpredictable travel environment during COVID.
• Investment analysis including collaboration with commercial team for business cases, modelling of investments and post-investment reviews including payback periods and NPVs.
• Business partnering Senior Leadership Team with providing reporting to Marketing, Operations, Business Development, Regional Managing Directors and CEO.
• Production of 13 week cashflow forecasting and management of cash positions for operational use and capital investments, including tracking against covenants.
• Collaborating with commercial/operational leads on ad-hoc projects including dynamic pricing and opening times, cost-saving initiatives and benchmarking.

• Working in transactional roles including AP and AR, before moving into process improvement role and supervisory roles.
• Working with large datasets from various misaligned sources, completing cleansing and analysis to enable actions by operational finance team.
• Assisting finance teams with implementation of new finance system upgrade.
• Credit checks on clients by analysing financial statements and key ratios.
• Management of direct reports.