Principal Accountant

Job Title: Principal Accountant
Starting Salary: £53,806 progressing to £59,496 per annum
Hours: 37 per week
Location: Stevenage with hybrid working opportunities
Contract Type: Permanent
Directorate: Resources

About the team

Hertfordshire County Council’s (HCC) Finance Team is recruiting three Principal Accountants — two within Children’s Services and one supporting Adult Care Services.

Your role will not only deliver value to over 1.2 million residents across Hertfordshire, but your contribution will also be instrumental in upholding our core values, enhancing lives, and fostering a culture of integrity.

The Principal Accountant role within Children’s Services – Dedicated Schools Grant (DSG) includes line management of two Senior Accountants. The primary focus is addressing the financial pressures within the DSG budget and overseeing delegated budgets to schools. Hertfordshire receives a DSG allocation of £1.5 billion, with just over half managed by the authority and maintained schools.

The second Principal Accountant role within Children’s Services focuses on financial oversight of the Children Looked After (CLA) budgets, which have a net budget exceeding £200 million. You will lead a team of three Senior Accountants who provide financial support across key service areas including Independent Placements, Safeguarding, Fostering and Adoption, and 0–25 Disability services.

The third role is within the Business Partner Finance team supporting Adult Care Services, (ACS), which has a net budget of over £520m. You will lead on the support for our Care Purchasing and Staffing Budgets, as well as providing specialist financial business partner support for key transformational projects. You will lead a team with two Senior Accountants reporting to you.

As a senior member of the Finance team (reporting to the Finance Manager), the responsibilities in all three roles will include leading on budget setting, monitoring, modelling of key data sets to inform stakeholders in decision making and monitoring of key transformational savings programmes.

About the role

• You will lead on the budget setting process for the service and have responsibility for the modelling and monitoring of key transformational savings programmes and service strategies.
• You will support, develop, train and motivate the team reporting to you.
• Provide business focussed financial advice to budget managers and key stakeholders on financial matters, providing constructive challenge.
• To identify opportunities for service improvement and increased efficiency and to actively promote and champion such change

About you

Essential

• Be a fully qualified accountant (CIPFA or equivalent), or be qualified by experience
• Have the ability to build relationships up to Chief Officer level both within HCC and partner organisations, creating trust and confidence and fostering a partnership approach.
• Have the ability to problem solve. Determine solutions that reflect wider implications, (eg political, managerial etc), and stakeholder needs. Ensure identification and delivery of improvements and negotiating the delivery of actions where these are outside of your direct control, (and even outside of your organisation).
• Have the ability to explain complex financial information and risks associated with the information to senior leaders within both HCC and partner organisations.
• Have extensive experience of managing key financial processes, and be able to interpret and apply financial policies, procedures, guidance and legislation.
• Be able to challenge effectively and influence others where those people may not be within HCC

• Ability to make effective use of multiple data sources (including ensuring that you have complete and accurate information) to carry out detailed financial analysis and present the results in a clear concise way.

Desirable

• Previous exposure to Education, Social Care or similar demand led budgets would be beneficial, although not essential.
• Experience in working for local government would be beneficial

We welcome applications from candidates who currently reside in the UK with established proof of right to work documentation. We are not able to offer sponsorship at this time for this role.

This job role is within the Corporate Services, level 13 job profile. Please locate this via:

Job profiles - Corporate services

To hear more about this opportunity please contact Saira.Muschamp@hertfordshire.gov.uk (CS) or James.Woodward@hertfordshire.gov.uk (ACS) for an informal discussion about the role.

Interview Date: week commencing 3rd November

Benefits of working for us

How to apply

As part of your application, please upload your most recent CV. Ensure your CV is up to date with your employment history (including any employment gaps), and including any training/qualifications. We encourage you to include examples of where you have demonstrated the requirements/criteria in the advert / job profile to allow the panel to fully recognise your skills and abilities. You will have the opportunity to include a short covering paragraph within your application to give us a little more information about your skills, knowledge, and experiences.

Additional information

Disability Confident
We are proud to be a Disability Confident employer and guarantee an interview to anyone disclosing a disability whose application meets the minimum criteria for the post.