Cost Associate

About the role
- Be a positive influence and an integral part of the team including working with the Hub as "one team"
- Under the guidance of Divisional Insight Business Partners, develop and maintain relationships with Business stakeholders required to execute your responsibilities
- Reports to the Cost Manager

**Role Location**: 833 Collins Street, Docklands VIC 3008

**Role Type**: Permanent, Full-Time opportunity

Your business

The Cost Centre of Excellence (‘Cost CoE’) is part of the Financial Performance Management team (‘FPM’) within Enterprise Finance and is responsible for supporting the Group CFO, the Deputy & Divisional CFOs and the business make optimal resource allocation decisions in relation to cost. To do this, the Cost CoE undertakes a range of performance management activities including planning, forecasting, reporting and analysis, which provide actionable insight and advice to its stakeholders. The Cost CoE establishes governance and performs financial control activities within the cost domain to ensure the integrity of the cost result.

Within FPM, the Cost CoE provides enterprise capability and divisional expertise to drive strategic outcomes and leverages its scale to drive continual process improvement within the cost domain.

Your team’s role

This teams sits within the Retail & Commercial Divisions Cost COE team and will support both the Retail and Commercial businesses.

Your reporting lines and stakeholders

To succeed in your role, you will need to develop and maintain strong stakeholder relationships across FPM, other Finance teams (e.g. Australia Finance Insight Business Partners); and business stakeholders where relevant. You will also need to collaborate closely with dedicated change teams that sit within the FPM function to deliver change initiatives impacting your business area.

What will your day look like

As a Cost Associate, you will work as part of a team of Cost Experts with responsibility for all cost related activities at a Divisional or Group level, including provision of accurate and timely financial information (Actuals, Performance Reporting, Outlook, Plan and provision of insightful cost related data and analytics), covering BAU costs and investments/projects.

You will primarily be Divisionally or Group aligned; and may have generalist Finance skills with BU level responsibilities; or be a specialist for specific cost related processes where a high degree of process and accounting knowledge is required.

As a divisionally aligned Cost Expert you will be co-located with Divisional Insight Business Partners and the Divisional Performance Management team forming close relationships with our peers to deliver a seamless service proposition for your stakeholders. In some cases you may be required to build and maintain relationships with Business stakeholders in collaboration with Divisional Insight Business Partners.

You will be responsible for driving continuous improvement of cost processes to extract efficiencies, ensuring the optimisation of controls, management of risks, points of friction and governance obligations are met on an continuous basis; drawing on Cost CoE process experts to build a first class capability in Finance, focusing on best practice cost management and consistency of implementation across all Divisions in collaboration with relevant GPOs.


**Your key priorities and responsibilities include**:

- Manage the monthly financial close process, including finalisation of actuals, PcP & driver based analytical review, management reporting, and balance sheet reconciliations
- Own and run cost models used to facilitate the planning and outlook process
- Provide commentary on current year outlook, variance analysis for PcP, Plan & outlook
- Support Divisional Insights Business Partners with financial analysis and reporting to drive decision making
- Support the business through the investment process including reviewing actuals/forecast and uploading data into PPM
- Complete strategic reviews of the cost base including making recommendations on how funds should be used
- Provide Business level performance management reporting & analysis to ensure that stakeholders (Business & Div. Insights) are held to account for the Cost Management decisions they make
- Analyse business performance and key business drivers to identify and communicate issues requiring action, while taking emerging trends and external market conditions into consideration
- Ensure management and statutory reporting obligations are well managed
- Develop and maintain effective working relationships with the Finance Insights Business Partner, offshore Financial Control team and business stakeholders
- Drive continuous improvement of cost processes to extract efficiencies, optimise controls and better manage risks and governance obligations
- Work alongside Cost CoE process experts to build a first class capability in Finance, focusing on best practice cost management and