Senior Principal Functional Consultant

About us

At Aptitude we love complexity.

We immerse ourselves in the intricacies of finance digitization, subscription management, compliance, and revenue management which gives us the power to make a real impact. Once we understand how an organization works, we can implement software solutions that provide the clarity, confidence, and control they need to drive growth and achieve their ambitions.

Aptitude has served the offices of finance for over 20 years, delivering financial control and insights to empower our clients to achieve their strategies and ambitions. We are currently serving over 75 CFOs whose organisations generate a combined revenue of over $1 Trillion.

We are proud of our growing team of smart, motivated and passionate people, and believe diverse experiences and perspectives build stronger teams and better solutions.

Headquartered in London, we have seven office locations around the world with clients across four continents.

What you'll do and what we offer

As a Senior Principal Functional Consultant, you may be asked to support either Delivery or Assure services for clients. You may have project responsibilities for configuring Aptitude Software’s (‘Aptitude’) products or you may be responsible for providing high-quality support of clients’ configured production solutions.

You will possess expert domain knowledge and be accountable for project functional implementations. You will deal with clients’ most senior executives and by demonstrating strong leadership, you will give them the confidence to trust in our ability to deliver working solutions. Being the most senior Aptitude consultant on a project, you will be expected to demonstrate the gravitas that comes with this responsibility.

The role requires that your decision-making process considers risk and the commercial relationships between Aptitude and its clients,
consistently striving to deliver value to all parties. You will be responsible for leading the Scope & Analysis phases to develop a shared vision of the end-state solution with clients.

To facilitate a project’s delivery, you must ensure that a milestone-oriented plan, which reflects all known external dependencies, is in place and that it is managed throughout the project lifecycle. The role may require managing other functional members of the implementation team. The team will be made up of a combination of Aptitude employees, partner staff and client staff. You will oversee a successful handover of the solution to the client and Aptitude’s internal support services.

You will liaise with Aptitude’s product development teams to inform them when clients’ requirements cannot be met by the product and work to close those gaps.

As the Senior Principal Functional Consultant, you will establish best practices to be followed by your team to ensure that our delivery is fit for purpose. You will actively engage with the Product and Innovation team and other project teams to share knowledge, best practices and lessons learned.

It is a given that a Senior Principal Functional Consultant will proactively keep up to date with relevant knowledge and skills, motivate the team, mentor other consultants, celebrate milestones and ensure that they are aligned to the evolving company culture, contributing towards internal communications, and sharing stories to the wider Aptitude community where appropriate.

If you have line management responsibilities, a key part of this role involves managing and developing other Functional Consultants. This will include responsibilities such as, Career Management, identifying training opportunities, Compensation reviews, Employee Relations and provide guidance on best practice to ensure the quality of delivery is fit for purpose. You will also be expected to support the interviewing, hiring and induction process for new Functional Consultants.

The role may be performed on client premises and may involve travel in-country and/or overseas.

What we're looking for

Although not an exhaustive list, a Principal Technical Consultant must be proficient in the following Skills.

Consultancy

• Communicate in a concise and timely manner with stakeholder groups to ensure that critical information is conveyed at an appropriate level of detail.
• Able to develop and present a vision of a fit for purpose and future proof functional solution to stakeholders.
• Recognise and mandate functional best practices and principles to be employed by the combined implementation team.
• Effectively manage functional consultants, i.e. career management (if applicable)
• Effectively utilise team members to maximise productivity through the assignment of clear roles and responsibilities, whilst supporting their career aspirations.
• Gain the confidence of clients’ project managers and be recognised by them as the “go-to” resource for functional matters related to Aptitude’s products.

Business Analysis

• Identify and manage stakeholder groups, categorising their current activities and defining their roles in the context of the target operating model.
• Use business analysis techniques, including interviews and workshops, to analyse business processes and capture requirements in a form suitable to feed into the design phase.

Design

• Establish a set of core principles which will guide your translation of the requirements into a solution design.
• Relate requirements and/or accounting policies to the Aptitude product(s) capabilities, ensuring the functional design adheres to these.
• Work with the business and finance team(s) to design the solution such that it supports the required financial accounting and reporting, as well as business and control processes.

Accountancy

• Apply expert knowledge of accounting principles and the various facets of technical accounting.
• Be conversant in the applicable accounting standards, demonstrating experience of regulatory/accounting standards adoption.
• Demonstrate a deep knowledge of products / financial instruments from an accounting perspective, with industry experience.
• Be knowledgeable of the business processes in the finance landscape and recognise clients’ goals as part of their finance transformation programmes.

Implementation

• Lead the resolution of functional related issues such as unexpected results or reconciliation mismatches during testing stages.
• Offer advice and guidance to clients on areas which may lay outside the boundaries of Aptitude’s responsibilities such as best practice General Ledger code block configuration.
• Demonstrate a deep understanding of RDBMS concepts and an ability to interrogate data sets using database SQL.
• Be familiar with, and leverage the benefits of, your technical team’s approach to Continuous Integration (CI) / Continuous Testing (CT).
• In the context of managed services, you will be able to design, develop, implement, and operate controls including policies and procedures for Aptitude’s Cloud Services system. You will reassess the suitability of design and implementation of control activities based on the operation and monitoring of those activities and update the controls as necessary.
• Able to effectively conduct detailed functional, (design and/or configuration) reviews as and when required.

How to apply

Please click on the ‘Apply now’ button below, including your CV/resume and any other relevant information that will help us get to know you better.

Diversity and Inclusion

If you’re interested in working at Aptitude, but don’t feel you meet every single requirement of the role, we’d still like to hear from you!  A diverse workforce is an essential part of our culture, and we’re dedicated to ensuring that our staff can show up as their authentic self – safe in the knowledge that their differences will be embraced and respected by all. We’re strong advocates of supporting applicants from a wide variety of backgrounds which include different ages, genders, ethnicities, physical abilities and sexual orientation, and we work hard to build the confidence of our workforce through inclusivity, equity and ongoing training. So, if you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every requirement, we’d encourage you to apply anyway. You might be just the candidate we’ve been looking for, whether it’s for this role or another.