Finance Controller

Job Summary

In the role of Head of Finance, you utilize leadership and financial competencies to support Sales and other business leaders by driving financial analysis to support financial planning, budgeting, decision making, and performance. Your excellent communication skills enable you to present analysis, results, recommendations, and influence decisions at all levels of the organization, including senior management, inside and outside of Japan.
You are the primary finance business partner to the Japan business leaders, and you are a consultant and challenger, bringing insights and financial acumen as well as providing stewardship of Japan based resources and governance of the P&L.
As the Head of Finance, you support business leaders in achieving financial targets and key sales objectives, while at the same time setting the compliance tone with special focus on managing spend, concessions and discounts, as well as maintaining a strong compliance culture across all of NetApp Japan.
In addition, a key part of the role is to provide objectiveness and stewardship to the company, acting as a representative of the NetApp Finance function and NetApp shareholders.
This is a people management role: you will have one direct report for you to mentor, coach and grow, and to assist you in providing all of the above services to the NetApp Japan business.
This role reports to the Senior Finance Director Asia Pacific, with a strong dotted line to the VP of Sales for Japan, and the broader Japan Leadership team.

Main Responsibilities:

• Manages the Japan P&L, provides recommendations and action plans to ensure contribution margin targets are met or overachieved. In case of overachievement, create investment plans to fund further growth, and in case of underachievement establishes savings plans. Manages and monitors progress and execution of those plans.
• Prepares analysis and commentary on variances and trends in the P&L, including Backlog, Revenue, Support waterfall, Cost of Goods Sold, individual product margins, Cloud Revenue, Operating Expenses and headcount.
• Responsible for investment evaluation and prioritization, as well as setting strategies and allocating resources to achieve financial targets. Ensures key financial metrics of the P&L are understood and proactively monitored to drive the business. (revenue, costs, discounts, gross margin & contribution margin). Provides stewardship of Japan based resources and P&L governance.
• Responsible for the financial planning and analysis process for Japan. Formulates appropriate financial strategies and business plans to support sales leaders in profitably growing the business. Supports the identification of market opportunities and determines business and financial strategies to maximize those market opportunities.
• Leads the financial analysis activities for Japan, interprets root causes of financial results, investigates variances, and formulate remediation plans and/or investment plans. Produces actionable insights to drive top-line revenue and optimize contribution margin.
• Collaborates with Business Desk to optimize deal economics and ensure high quality submissions for internal deal review requests. Advises and challenges account team on pricing, configuration, discounting, revenue, and margin implications. Owns revenue allocation tool and deal economics models that estimate margin and profitability.
• Monitors and supports field management’s responsibility to mitigate risk with a focus on ensuring ethical sales, spend management, and discounts in accordance with NetApp’s policies. Ensures that effective internal controls, including robust planning systems and processes to appropriately manage risk, are maintained throughout Japan.
• Mentor, coach and grow one direct report, and also help to foster growth of all of the Finance employees in Asia Pacific as and when required.

Key Capabilities Required:

1) Build productive relationship with Finance, Sales and the broader NetApp team; cross-functional collaboration is crucial
2) Understand & visualize the big picture
3) Anticipatory mindset; actionable forward-looking insights
4) Ability to prioritize and make trade-offs
5) Ability to execute and drive tasks to completion; Problem solve and deliver results
6) Understand and articulate different business models
7) People management and employee development skills
8) Be a leader in your role; energy provider

Education

• University degree in Finance, Accounting or Business Administration
• 10+ years of experience in business-oriented finance roles with evidence of continuous professional development.
• Proficient in Office 365 applications, especially in Excel
• Experience with Financial Planning, Business Intelligence, ERP and CRM software
• Proficient knowledge of US GAAP
• Advanced quantitative and analytical skills.
• Proficient written and oral skills in both Japanese and English
IC - Typically requires a minimum of 15 years of related experience.Mgr & Exec - Typically requires a minimum of 10 years of related experience.