Role
Senior Manager – Budgeting, Planning & Financial Analysis – Sports BU
Function
Development Finance & Analysis (DFA)
Operating Model Alignment
This role is a senior role within Sports DFA, covering:
- Planning & Decision Support
- Budgeting & Forecasting
- Project Accounting & Financial Control
- Reporting & Insights
- Risk & Governance (in coordination with Risk)
- Systems, Data & Transformation
Role Purpose
To support the Director FP&A in the budgeting, planning, project accounting, and performance reporting agenda across the Sports asset portfolio, with a strong grounding in construction and development-stage financial management.
The role drives system-led automation and standardisation, with a strong focus on SAP and PRISM, ensuring a single version of the truth for TDC, cash flow, funding, and financial performance. The role acts as the financial integrator between Development, PMO, Commercial, Risk, Treasury, Development teams, and IT.
Key Responsibilities
1 . Budgeting & Forecasting
- Lead annual, multi-year, and rolling budget processes across assets and BUs, covering pre-development, construction and delivery phases
- Establish and maintain TDC baselines, reforecasts, and cash-flow projections, incorporating construction progress and procurement strategies
- Implement driver-based budgeting models linking scope, program, procurement, and construction productivity drivers to outcomes
- Own budget phasing aligned with construction programs to support funding plans, cash calls, and liquidity management
- Align budgets and forecasts with funding strategies (equity, debt, drawdowns, covenants)
2. Project Accounting & Financial Control
- Process and control project accounting transactions in SAP (in coordination with Finance) & PRISM, including budget uploads, budget transfers, commitment creation, accrual postings, and cost allocations
- Maintain commitment and actuals tracking at project, package, and contract level, ensuring timely and accurate capture of construction costs
- Monitor forecast-to-complete (FTC) and update projections based on certified quantities, executed variations and procurement commitments
- Track and record TDC movements, including approved budget changes, reallocations and cumulative impact of variation orders and claims
- Record and monitor contingency, inflation and risk drawdowns, ensuring approvals are obtained and reflected correctly in systems
- Perform monthly reconciliations between budgets, commitments, actuals, and cash flow, investigating and resolving variances
- Maintain complete audit trails for all budget changes, approvals and re-baselining actions in line with governance requirements
- Support internal and external audits by providing transaction-level support, reconciliations and documentation
- Ensure compliance with financial policies, approval matrices and delegations of authority related to construction and development spend
3 . Planning & Decision Support
- Support asset feasibility and development-stage business planning, ensuring assumptions on construction cost, revenue, program and lifecycle are realistic and aligned with financial strategy
- Lead option analysis (phasing, packaging, procurement strategy, acceleration/deceleration), quantifying financial trade-offs across development and construction stages
- Develop scenario and stress-testing models to assess impacts of inflation, delays, constructability risks, funding constraints and scope changes
- Support stage-gate financial readiness reviews, ensuring affordability, funding, constructability and risk impacts are clearly articulated
- Partner with Development, Construction, and PMO teams to translate master programs into financially phased plans
4. Reporting & Insights
- Deliver consolidated BU-level financial and non-financial reporting across development and construction, including:
- TDC baseline vs forecast vs actual
- Construction cost and progress variance analysis
- Funding availed vs required
- Cash-flow projections
- Commitments, risks, and opportunities
- Design and deliver management, ExCo, and Board dashboards with clear construction and development narratives
- Embed early-warning indicators (cost overruns, program slippage, cash pressure)
- Ensure reporting supports delivery and investment decisions, not just compliance
5. Risk & Governance (Coordination Model)
- Coordinate closely with the central Risk team, ensuring:
- Consistent risk taxonomy and scoring
- Alignment with ERM frameworks
- Clear ownership between DFA, Risk, Development, PMO, and Construction
- Integrate construction and development risk impacts into budgets, forecasts, and dashboards
- Participate in joint risk reviews and stage-gate forums
- Support governance committees with quantified financial impacts of construction and delivery risks
Note: Risk ownership remains with the Risk function; DFA provides financial quantification and integration.
6. Systems, Data & Transformation
- Act as DFA lead for SAP and PRISM across construction budgeting, project accounting, and reporting
- Drive automation of budget vs forecast vs actual reporting, eliminating spreadsheet-heavy construction cost tracking
- Ensure seamless integration between:
- SAP (actuals, commitments, accruals)
- Construction cost systems (e.g. Unifier or equivalent)
- PRISM dashboards
- Define and maintain construction-ready data models, master data standards and reporting hierarchies (WBS, CBS, asset, BU)
- Lead adoption of standard templates, workflows, and system-based controls
- Partner with Finance, IT, CDU, DMO, and Construction teams on continuous improvement of DFA systems and analytics capability
Key Systems & Tools
- SAP (FI / CO / PS or equivalent project accounting modules)
- PRISM
- Cost management systems (Primavera Unifier or similar preferred)
- Power BI or similar BI tools
- Advanced Excel
Requirements
- 10–15+ years’ experience in budgeting, FP&A, or development finance within construction, real estate development, infrastructure or large capital projects
- Strong hands-on experience in construction project accounting, cost control and TDC management
- Demonstrated experience working closely with Development, Construction, PMO and Commercial teams
- Proven track record in finance systems automation, particularly SAP and PRISM in project environments
- Experience operating in matrixed, multi-stakeholder delivery organisations
- Professional qualification preferred (CA / CPA / ACCA / CFA)
