Job title: Finance Manager
Reports to: Head of Operations
Direct reports: Bookkeeper / Finance Assistant is expected to join the team as the business scales
Location: Sachet Factory Congleton — on site, with scope for hybrid working.
Hours: Full time, 37.5 hours per week, Monday to Friday
Contract: Permanent
Salary: Dependent on experience
Key systems: Xero, Unleashed, Microsoft applications – Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint
ABOUT SACHET FACTORY LIMITED
Sachet Factory Limited is a UK contract manufacturer specialising in sachet filling and packing. We produce for a growing portfolio of brand owners and trade customers, running raw materials, bills of materials, production batches and finished goods through Unleashed, with the financial record held in Xero.
The business is growing rapidly, and the finance function needs to grow with it. Volumes, customer numbers and production complexity have all increased, and the processes that carried us to this point now need to be rebuilt properly for the next stage of investment and growth. This is a business where finance is close to the factory floor — production, stock and customer billing are the numbers that matter, and they are visible every day.
PURPOSE OF THE ROLE
This is the first full-time finance appointment at Sachet Factory Limited, and the person in it will own the day-to-day financial running of the business and aid external resource and accountants to build out financial processes.
It is a genuinely hands-on, autonomous role. You will own the relationship between Unleashed and Xero, make certain every customer is billed correctly and on time, and chase what needs chasing. Equally, you will help automate the processes that make all that happen.
A large part of this role is the organisational discipline to make sure the right things happen at the right time across the business so that the numbers can be trusted. Influence, persistence and good working relationships matter here as much as technical accounting.
You will be supported by an external accountancy practice who handle payroll, corporation tax and VAT submissions. You will also be central to building out the finance function as the business scales, with real personal and professional progression alongside it.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
1. Day-to-day financial control
- Own the day-to-day finances of the business.
- Deliver a timely and accurate month-end close, including accruals, prepayments and stock, to an agreed timetable.
- Aid the production of monthly management accounts with commentary.
- Maintain robust balance sheet reconciliations, with every account owned, supported and reviewed monthly.
- Manage daily cash: bank reconciliations, cash flow forecasting, payment runs and working capital.
- Support budgeting, reforecasting and the year-end accounts.
2. Xero and Unleashed — system ownership
- Act as the finance owner of both Xero and Unleashed.
- Reconcile Unleashed to Xero as a disciplined, documented routine.
- Own stock accounting: valuation, costing, write-offs, wastage and the treatment of customer-owned or free-issue materials, working with Operations on stock counts and variance investigation.
- Maintain accurate product, customer, supplier and pricing data in Unleashed, and make sure bills of materials and standard costs reflect what happens in production.
3. Sales / Purchase ledger and controls
- Make certain every customer is billed correctly, completely and on time.
- Run credit control end to end: aged debt reporting, proactive chasing, escalation and, where needed, firm but commercially sensible conversations with customers.
- Reconcile supplier statements and manage supplier queries and payment terms.
- Monitor input costs, landed costs, freight and material price movements, and highlight the commercial impact early.
- Track overheads against budget and challenge spend where it is not earning its place.
- Aid the creation of the structure and documentation that a Bookkeeper can be recruited into, then support the recruitment and supervision of that person as the role grows.
4. Managing the external accountants and compliance
- Manage the relationship with the external accountancy practice, who prepare payroll and submit VAT and tax returns — set expectations, agree deadlines and hold them to the standard the business needs.
- Prepare and review the underlying information for VAT returns, payroll and corporation tax, and review their output critically before it is filed. Accountability for the accuracy of the source data sits with this role.
- Collate payroll inputs each period — starters, leavers, hours, overtime, absence and changes — and reconcile payroll costs and control accounts back to the ledger.
PERSON SPECIFICATION
Essential
- Qualification: Qualified or part-qualified accountant (ACCA, CIMA or ACA) or qualified by demonstrable experience in a comparable standalone role.
- Xero: Strong, practical Xero experience — not just using it, but configuring, correcting and controlling it.
- Inventory systems: Hands-on experience of an inventory or ERP system (Unleashed strongly preferred; Cin7, Katana, Fishbowl, Sage 200, SAP or similar considered) and of reconciling it to the general ledger.
- Stock and costing: Sound understanding of stock accounting, cost of goods sold, BOMs and product costing in a manufacturing or production environment.
- Billing and credit control: Track record of owning invoicing accuracy and collecting cash, with the confidence to chase customers persistently and professionally.
- Organisation: Exceptional organisational skill — able to run several deadlines, systems and stakeholders at once without dropping anything.
- Influence without authority: Able to get non-finance colleagues to do what the process needs, through credibility and follow-up rather than reporting lines.
- Process building: Comfortable inheriting an imperfect picture, digging into the detail, finding the root cause and building the process that stops it recurring.
- Excel: Strong Excel skills (lookups, pivots, large data sets, reconciliation models).
Pay: £55,000.00-£65,000.00 per year
Benefits:
- Free parking
- On-site parking
Work Location: In person
