Finance Team Lead

Finance Team Lead
Location : Stellenbosch (Techno Park)
Working Model : Hybrid (2 Day’s in-office and 3 days at home) – They also provide flexi-hours : Monday – Thursday = 10:00 – 17:00 & Friday’s 10:00 – 14:00.

About the role
As Finance Team Lead, you’ll own the standard of work coming out of a team of management accountants and systems specialists serving ambitious product-based businesses around the world. The team operates across two fronts: recurring management accounting work for an established client base, and project-based work, particularly ERP implementations and optimizations, where finance, operations, and systems collide.
You’ll be deep enough in the recurring finance work to set the bar yourself, and senior enough to grow the people doing it alongside you. The role demands technical accuracy, project discipline, and an instinct for where systems and process design unlock leverage.
This isn’t a conventional finance manager role, and we’re not looking for a conventional finance manager. We want someone who leads through doing: execution-heavy, process-minded, comfortable in the work itself, and who understands that modern finance leadership is as much about building leverage through systems, automation, and AI as it is about leading people. The right person sees their team’s output as a product to be designed, not just a workload to be managed.
It’s a real opportunity to shape a finance function, build a team, and operate at the intersection of finance, systems, and modern tooling.

What you’ll do
• Lead, develop, and grow a team of management accountants and systems specialists. Set the standard for quality, pace, and ownership, hold meaningful one-on-ones, and create the conditions for people to do their best work
• Own the review function across the team’s output: financial reports, dashboards, client deliverables, variance analyses, project deliverables, and system configurations. Catch what matters, coach on the rest, and make sure nothing leaves the team below the bar
• Hold senior client relationships across the portfolio, engaging directly with CFOs, founders, and exec teams, translating finance into decisions and back again. On projects, be the trusted hand on the wheel behind the scenes
• Design the repeatable workflows, templates, SOPs, and standards the team runs on, so it scales without dropping quality
• Champion AI across the function: find where AI tools can compress workflows, cut manual processing, and let the team operate with higher leverage, then lead adoption and continuous improvement
• Plan how work flows across recurring deliverables and project engagements: who’s on what, who’s stretched, where the bottlenecks are, keeping delivery on time without burning people out
• Help shape the team you’ll lead: interview, assess, and onboard new hires across both the accounting and systems sides
• Stay current on finance practices, ERP and finance system developments, AI tools, and industry shifts, and bring the best back to the team

What you’ll bring
• A degree in Accounting or Management Accounting (required)
• CIMA Affiliate, CGMA, CA, or equivalent is a strong plus
• Typically 5+ years post-qualification experience in management accounting, operational finance, or a related discipline
• Demonstrated experience leading or managing a finance team (a formal “manager” title isn’t required; evidence of doing the work is)
• Strong project management instincts: you’ve shipped multi-stakeholder finance or systems projects from kickoff to handover
• Hands-on finance operations exposure; leading or contributing to ERP implementations, migrations, or optimizations is a strong plus
• A strong technical foundation in management reporting, financial analysis, multi-entity work, and operational finance
• Comfortable across modern finance stacks (Xero or equivalent, Excel at depth, reporting and BI tools) and excited, not threatened, by AI changing how finance work gets done
• A bias toward systems thinking: you’ve designed processes, built playbooks, or rebuilt workflows that outlast you
• Excellent judgment in stakeholder communication, whether with a CFO, a founder, or a frustrated client mid-implementation
• A coaching instinct and a track record of helping people get better at their craft
• A track record of finishing things; project management is the job, not a side skill
• Curious, slightly geeky, ambitious, the kind of person who reads about how other teams operate and steals the good ideas
• E-commerce and/or manufacturing experience is beneficial

Benefits
• Competitive package with performance-based bonuses
• Comprehensive training and mentorship from experienced professionals
• Exposure to a wide variety of industries and international business environments
• Meaningful projects that directly impact clients’ success
• A clear career progression path based on performance and skill