Bottomline IT
Description
Essential Skills & Qualifications
Education & Certification: Bachelor's degree in Finance, Accounting, or related field. An MBA or CA is highly desirable.
Technical Financial Skills: Expert-level proficiency in financial modeling, variance analysis, and FP&A. Strong understanding of GAAP/IFRS.
Cloud Business Acumen: This is the differentiator. You must understand:
Cloud Service Models: IaaS, PaaS, SaaS.
Pricing Models: Pay-as-you-go, reserved instances, savings plans, spot pricing.
Cost Drivers: What makes running a cloud service expensive (hardware, energy, software, personnel)?
Analytical Prowess: Ability to work with large, complex datasets to find meaningful insights. SQL skills are a massive advantage.
Systems Proficiency: Experience with SAGE or similar planning tools. Proficiency in Excel is a given.
Requirements:
Town:
Randburg
Position:
Financial Manager in a Cloud Service Provider
Starting Date:
December 4, 2025
Date Created:
November 26, 2025
Soft Skills: Excellent communication and presentation skills to explain complex financial concepts to non-financial stakeholders. Strong business partnering and influence skills.
Key Challenges & Strategic Focus Areas
This is not a routine job. The main challenges include:
Managing a Complex Cost Structure: The cost base is a mix of massive fixed costs (data centers) and variable costs that scale with usage. Optimizing this is a constant battle.
Keeping Pace with Innovation: The cloud landscape changes weekly. New services, pricing tiers, and competitive threats emerge constantly, requiring constant financial re-evaluation.
The Shift from Capex to Opex (for Customers): While customers love this, it creates a revenue model that is usage-based and can be volatile, making forecasting difficult.
Analyzing Massive Datasets: Cloud generates terabytes of usage and billing data. Extracting actionable insights from this data is a core part of the job.
Global Scale: Cloud is global. A Finance Manager must deal with multiple currencies, tax jurisdictions, and regulatory environments
Duties Include:
Duties & Responsibilities
1. Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A):
Budgeting & Forecasting: Creating and managing budgets for cloud divisions, products, or cost centers. Forecasting is particularly challenging due to the rapid growth and scalability of cloud services.
Management Reporting: Delivering timely and accurate P&L statements, KPI dashboards, and variance analysis (actuals vs. budget/forecast) to senior leadership.
Long-Range Planning: Developing 3–5-year strategic financial plans to guide investment decisions.
2. Product & Service Profitability:
P&L Management: Owning the P&L for specific cloud service lines (e.g., Compute, Storage, Databases, AI/ML).
Cost Analysis: Deep-diving into the cost structure of cloud services, including data center costs (hardware, power, cooling, networking), software licensing, and R&D.
Pricing Strategy Support: Working with product and marketing teams to analyze the financial impact of new pricing models (e.g., spot instances, savings plans, tiered pricing) and competitive moves.
3.Business Partnering:
Strategic Advisor: Acting as a key finance partner to Engineering, Product Management, and Sales leaders. Providing data-driven insights to help them make better decisions on resource allocation, product investment, and go-to-market strategies.
Investment Analysis: Evaluating the ROI of new capital expenditures (e.g., building new data center regions) and R&D projects.
4.Operational Finance:
Month-End Close: Overseeing aspects of the accounting close process related to cloud revenue and costs, ensuring compliance with accounting standards (e.g., ASC 606 for revenue recognition).
Internal Controls: Maintaining a strong control environment for financial processes.
5. Key Performance Indicator (KPI) & Metric Management:
A Finance Manager in this space must be fluent in cloud-specific metrics, such as:
Revenue: Monthly/Annual Recurring Revenue (MRR/ARR), revenue growth.
Cost & Margin: Cost of Revenue (CoR), Gross Margin, Operating Margin.
Usage & Consumption: This is critical. Metrics like "Commitment Utilisation" (are customers using their committed spend?), "Cost per Unit" (e.g., cost per gigabyte-hour of storage), and customer burn rates.
Customer Economics: Customer Lifetime Value (LTV), Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), churn rate
Additional Info: