Senior Financial Manager – Vehicle Auctions -(LWSFMVA)

Main Job Function

• An outstanding opportunity for an accomplished finance professional with strong commercial finance, management accounting, operational control, and pricing discipline experience.
• The Senior Financial Manager is responsible for leading the finance function, ensuring accurate financial reporting, disciplined cash and working capital management, robust internal controls, and commercially sound pricing models that protect margin, stock turn, and risk exposure.
• The role also acts as the Managing Director’s financial right-hand, by converting financial, operational, procurement, sales, and AI-driven data insights into clear decisions that improve profitability, process efficiency, compliance, and sustainable growth.

Scope of Responsibilities

Financial Reporting and Management Accounts
• Prepare accurate monthly management accounts, branch packs, and consolidated financial reporting within agreed deadlines.
• Analyze revenue, gross profit, overheads, stock turns, working capital, EBITDA, and cash conversion trends.
• Explain variances against budget, forecast, prior month, and prior year, with practical corrective actions.
• Ensure balance sheet reconciliations, provisions, accruals, and intercompany accounts are complete, accurate, and reviewed.

Budgeting, Forecasting and Business Planning
• Lead annual budgets, rolling forecasts, and scenario planning, selling prices, margins, expenses, stock holding periods, cash flow, and technology investment.
• Partner with operational leaders to convert volume, conversion, pricing, insurance mandate, and procurement assumptions into realistic financial plans.
• Monitor forecast accuracy and escalate pricing, margin, stock, cash, technology, and procurement risks to the Managing Director early.
• Prepare business cases for new insurer mandates, private procurement channels, storage or yard capacity, auction or sales platforms, valuation tools, AI initiatives, and cost-saving initiatives.

Cash Flow, Working Capital and Funding
• Manage weekly and monthly cash flow forecasts, funding requirements, and liquidity risks.
• Oversee debtor collections, creditor payment discipline, bank reconciliations, and cash controls.
• Monitor floorplan, stocking loans, vehicle financing facilities, bank covenants, and interest costs.
• Drive working capital improvement through stock-age reduction, faster debt collection, supplier term management, and disciplined expense control.

Salvage Vehicle Commercial Support, Pricing and AI Enablement
• Track salvage vehicle volumes, sale proceeds, gross profit per unit, procurement cost, insurance mandate recoveries, towing and storage charges, repair estimate exposure, stock ageing, and deal-level profitability.
• Support pricing decisions for insurance salvage sales and private salvage procurement, ensuring valuation models reflect vehicle condition, demand, location, repair economics, historical selling prices, and target margin.
• Work with operations, IT, and data teams to implement AI-enabled valuation, pricing, stock triage, demand forecasting, anomaly detection, and reporting tools.

Governance, Risk and Compliance
• Maintain a strong control environment across cash, banking, stock, creditors, debtors, payroll, and approvals.
• Ensure compliance with tax, audit, statutory, POPIA, company policy, banking, and finance provider requirements.

Qualification
• Qualification in Accounting /Finance

Skills & Experience
• 10+ years
• Qualified or experienced finance professional with strong commercial finance, management accounting, operational control, and pricing discipline experience.
• Experience in salvage vehicles, insurance-linked vehicle disposals, auctions, vehicle remarketing, used vehicles, fleet, panel-beating, repair network, or high-volume stock-based trading environment preferred.
• Strong Excel, ERP, stock system, reporting, dashboard, pricing model, and data analytics capability.
• Commercially confident in reviewing valuation assumptions, procurement pricing, margin risk, and deal profitability.
• Comfortable working with IT, data, and operations teams to implement AI-enabled tools and validate outputs against real commercial results.
• Confident communicator who can challenge operations constructively and support the MD with clear recommendations.
• Hands-on, deadline-driven, detail-focused, and comfortable operating in a fast-moving, high-volume trading environment.

A Consultant will be in touch if you are shortlisted for the position. Please consider your application unsuccessful should you not have been contacted within 2 weeks. We will keep your CV on our database and contact you should you match the criteria of any other vacancies.