Production accountant (8 months fixed term contract)

Closing date: 4th February 2025

Salary: £38,000 - £43,000 depending on relevant skills, knowledge and experience. The expected salary range for this role reflects internal benchmarking and external market insights.

Location: Office Base is Salford, Manchester. This is a hybrid role and the successful candidate will balance office working with home working. Please note there will be a little travel involved as and when required

Partner with creative minds to balance storytelling with spreadsheets as a BBC production accountant, ensuring productions stay on budget while delivering world-class content.

This role is part of a team of Production Accountants and Assistant Production Accountants who are located within production departments. They are part of a larger team within Finance Central. Finance Central is the BBC’s shared finance service centre which provides a finance service to all areas of the BBC. 

The Production Accountant will work in partnership with programme makers across different production genres. The role will provide financial expertise and guidance to production teams to enable effective financial control and decision-making. The role will also ensure productions operate within financial control frameworks.

Key responsibilities

• Providing effective financial control and management of budgets (including staff numbers and income) on productions.
• Providing accurate and achievable forecasts, balancing creative aspirations with financial and resource constraints. Provide regular cost reports and timely advice on budget control to key stakeholders
• Monitoring, controlling and reporting on actual expenditure against budget in BBC's main accounting packages. Highlighting potential overspends/ underspend and notifying relevant stakeholders as soon as possible.
• Preparing final accounts and ensure all outstanding claims are settled; produce robust month end reports and close the production accounts in line with agreed procedures
• Helping to track progress towards financial targets and quotas driven by strategic priorities
• Preparing and revising a phased final cost forecast to support effective and timely decision-making and aid centralised cash flow forecasting
• Establishing and maintaining an audit trail for all work undertaken and to liaise with internal and external auditors as necessary throughout the year.
• Operating within and adhere to agreed BBC standards, policy and procedures as well as external HMRC governance and regulatory compliance.
• Managing location bank accounts and local cash/payment card facilities in accordance with relevant policies
• Carrying out ad hoc financial analysis to provide insight to production management teams and embedded finance teams
• Managing Assistant Production Accountants for the duration of a production, identifying skill gaps and working with the Finance Manager to set objectives and development plans
   

Knowledge, skills and experience

Essential

• Experience of working in production finance
• Understanding the financial conventions in production, ability to identify cost drivers understand the need for accurate cost control and forecasting
• Maintain overall control of the production budget through regular and detailed monitoring and information recording
• Understanding the financial impact of editorial decisions and the implications of different options

Desirable

• Professional Accounting qualification e.g. ACA, ACCA, CIMA, or equivalent
• SAP experience & Excel

Life at BBC Studios

We don’t focus simply on what we do – we also care how we do it. Our values and the way we behave are important to us. Please make sure you’ve read about our values and behaviours here.

The BBC is committed to building a culturally diverse workforce, that represents the audiences we serve, and encourages applications from candidates from any background, especially people from diverse communities. Equity of opportunity is important to us, and we endeavour to make our processes equal, fair and meritocratic for everybody. More information on our D&I plan can be found here.

BBC Studios puts sustainability at the heart of everything we do both onscreen and offscreen, including delivering against the BBC Group’s science-based Net Zero targets. More information on sustainability at BBC Studios can be found here.

We are proud to share that we are a Level 2 Disability Confident Employer and if you require any reasonable adjustments in order to apply please contact us on reasonable.adjustments@bbc.co.uk.

We appreciate your interest in this position and understand how important this opportunity is to you. Due to the high volume of interest we may need to close the application period earlier than anticipated. This step is necessary to ensure we can provide a high level of attention and service to all applicants. Thank you for your understanding. 

Please state in your application that you found this role through Creative Access.