Senior Finance and Operations Roles

Globally and nationally wildlife is in steep decline. We appear to be reaching critical tipping points around the loss of biodiversity as well as around climate change, both being interlinked. Human society cannot prosper without wildlife and healthy ecosystems.

Kent’s wildlife needs to be restored to much higher levels. We can no longer allow common things to become rare. We can only do this by restoring large-scale habitat from degraded land. Doing this will contribute to solving global problems. But we won’t be able to do this unless we publicly aspire to a higher level of impact and show that we can deliver this.

At KWTG, we are a highly ambitious charity at the cutting edge of conservation methods to tackle the nature and climate crisis. Our work is exciting and far reaching, recently hitting national and international news. We have not fully specified these roles but will mold them to the people to get the most skilled and committed individuals.

We are looking for the right people with the right skills who have the approach and ethos that fits in with our cultural pillars of agility, courage, accountability, collaboration, growing people and inclusive and diverse.

The core skills and experience we are looking for are charity finances with the experience of both statutory and management accounting, as well as commercial accounting to cope with our varied projects – and substantive restricted income – as well as our varied not-for-profit subsidiaries.

We do have some minimum qualifications that we desire, but recognise that one individual may not meet all these requirements.

We would love to hear from anyone from Senior Finance Managers/ Heads of Finance through to COO/CFO’s.

We anticipate these roles as full Time, 37.5hrs per week with agile working suited to the candidate. However, we will consider part-time applicants if they can demonstrate their capacity to delivery results in a time efficient manner.

Skills/Experience/Person Specification

We are looking for two to three people who between them can demonstrate fulfill the breadth of skills and experience specified below:

• Fully qualified charity finance professional with experience of statutory and management accounting in a medium to large-scale NGO context.
• Oversight, and or production of year-end audits, in-year audit trails; monthly management account reporting; quarterly, and year-end trustee reports or equivalent.
• Successful management of multi-disciplinary financial and/ or operational teams.
• Excellent communication skills and knowledge of digital accounting systems
• Ability to support, and engage with, a wide variety of internal and external stakeholders.
• Experience of working at a senior level in a charity, or organisation of comparable complexity to the KWT Group.
• Confident in providing advice to the senior leadership team, Board of trustees, and various sub-committees.
• Proven ability to successfully oversee, and take responsibility for, a range of financial and operational duties including HR; admin, IT; facilities, fleet and infrastructure.
• Experience of owning organisational risk management including specific oversight of GDPR, safeguarding, Health & Safety via implementation of organisational policies delivered through cross-organisational teams and systems.
• Experience of successful change management within financial and/ or operational teams.

As well as demonstrating a willingness to :

• Develop KWTG’s finance team to provide best practice internal management accounting, processing and reporting services via leading a business partnering/ internal client approach at the same time as meeting statutory accounting/ SORP requirements for trustees and auditors.
• Work with internal and external clients and contractors to improve digital financial systems including use of the existing finance software: xLedger.
• Lead, motivate and manage finance and/ or operational teams to deliver work both within and outside the candidate’s direct knowledge and experience.
• Lead on scrutiny and oversight of delivery of major contracts, as delegated by the CEO.
• Take overall responsibility for, managing the team responsible for, the KWTG premises and property portfolio such as lease agreements, insurance, security, H&S, and maintenance.
• Work with peers on Senior Management Team (Directors and above) and/ or the Leadership Team (Heads of and above) to get and maintain a full understanding of KWTGs business, recognising the importance of understanding the delivery side of KWTG in order to be able to successfully deliver finance and operations.

Kent Wildlife Trust is the leading wildlife charity for Kent and Medway, supported by its members and staffed by committed professionals. Join our team and help us create a Wilder Kent! In return we will inspire you, listen to you, value you, treat you equally and fairly, look after your health and wellbeing and encourage flexibility from day one, enabling you to draw on these benefits to be a better, happier and more productive you.

We are unable to recruit anyone who does not have a right to work in the UK.

Contact Details

If you wish to discuss this post, please email jobs@wilderkent.org.uk.

If this sounds like the ideal job for you but you’re not sure if you have all of the necessary experience, we’d still like to hear from you, so drop us a line.

Please send a CV and short covering letter telling us why you would be a perfect fit for us to jobs@wilderkent.org.uk or apply using the button below.