SAP Finance Transformation Associate Director

Job Description

SAP Finance Transformation Associate Director

Career level: Associate Director (CL5) • Location: London / Manchester / Edinburgh • Practice: Finance Reinvention Partner (SAP)

Why this role

SAP is where most of our finance transformation pipeline sits, and this role exists to convert it. You'll spend your time in front of clients, finding the finance problem worth solving, turning it into a pursuit, shaping the deal, and leading the early discovery that sets the programme up before our delivery teams take it on. It's a senior, market-facing seat with a clear brief: build relationships with finance and technology leadership, grow the accounts you work on, and bring work into the practice.

Accenture is a leading solutions and services company. Our strategy is to be the reinvention partner of choice for our clients and lead in the safe, widespread adoption of AI. We bring together our people, deep industry expertise and technology to deliver end-to-end outcomes for clients - and Finance is one of seven Reinvention Partners at the centre of that. Finance RP brings the CFO agenda to life for clients - stronger performance, sharper insight, and better control.

"Our clients want a partner that can help them reinvent-boldly, continuously and at speed... while continuously building the most client-focused, AI-enabled great place to work for our people-our Reinventors." - Julie Sweet, Chair and CEO

What you'll bring

Originating and winning SAP finance work. This is the core of the role. You build and hold senior relationships with CFOs, Finance Directors, CIOs and transformation leads, and you use them to spot where an SAP finance problem is costing a client real money, open the conversation, and turn it into a qualified pursuit. You own the qualification call. You decide what we chase and what we walk away from, and you own the commercial shape we take to the client: the scope, the solution, the team, the construct and the value case that makes it fundable. You lead bids and orals, you know how to position against the firms you'll be up against, and you're comfortable owning a pipeline rather than a plan. You grow the accounts you're on, and you make sure the next piece of work is in view before the current one lands.

Credibility on SAP finance programmes. Configuration isn't part of this role. What matters is that you can hold your own in a serious conversation about SAP-enabled finance transformation with a CFO or a CIO and come out of it with a shaped deal. You know what an S/4HANA finance programme involves: how the finance design fits with the wider programme, what it takes to move a finance function off a legacy landscape, what realistic sequencing and timelines look like, and what drives the cost. You also know what goes wrong: where finance design decisions get deferred and come back as rework, where data and master data sink a timeline, where the business case quietly stops adding up, and where a client's own readiness is the real constraint. That pattern recognition, earned on real programmes, is what makes a client trust the recommendation you put in front of them.

Talking to the CFO agenda, not the system. You connect SAP capability to what a finance leadership team actually cares about: a faster and more reliable close, reporting the business trusts, stronger control, better insight, and a finance function that costs less to run. You're grounded in the finance process spine an SAP programme touches: Record-to-Report first, and the wider processes around it. You know it well enough to diagnose a client's problem in their language rather than the platform's, and to build a value case a CFO will sign off. The platform matters less here than the judgement you bring: you can talk credibly about SAP and about comparable finance platforms, and give advice a client believes because it is rooted in their business and not in a product.

Leading early discovery. Once the work is won, you lead the front end: the discovery, the diagnostic, the visioning and the early design where the decisions that shape everything downstream get made. You run those phases in front of the client, setting the agenda, chairing the senior sessions, and standing as the finance design authority. You make the calls that hold the shape of the solution together, and you take the client's leadership to a decision they'll stand behind. You hand over to delivery with a defined scope, an agreed design direction and a client that knows what it has signed up to. You stay close enough to protect the relationship and the commercial position as the programme runs.

SAP Business AI in the conversation. AI is now part of every serious SAP finance discussion, and you need to hold that part of it in front of a client's finance leadership. You can talk about SAP Business AI and Joule: what is shipping today, what is still roadmap, and what that difference means for a client putting a programme behind it. You can hold the same conversation on agentic AI in and around finance processes: where an agent can credibly run a close task or a reconciliation, what that does to controls and evidence, and where a person still has to own the judgement. You can speak to how frontier AI capability outside the SAP stack interacts with an SAP landscape, and give a client a straight read on what that combination is good for today. In a pursuit, that shows up in what AI changes about the scope, the design and the value case, and in what it leaves untouched. It shows up in the room too, because a CFO or a CIO will test you on it and you need to come through that with your credibility intact. You won't be asked to build any of it yourself; the bar here is judgement and fluency, not engineering. We're also increasingly an AI-first firm in how we work ourselves, with agentic tooling and orchestration in diagnostics, value-case modelling and pursuit shaping, and our people owning the judgement and the outcome. If you already sell and shape that way, that's a real plus.

Building the capability behind the work. You also build the capability that has to be ready when the deals land. You attract senior people into the SAP finance team and grow the bench behind the work you win, you pull colleagues into the pursuits you shape so the capability deepens across the team, and you coach the managers and senior managers coming up behind you. You treat market eminence as a commercial instrument. A clear, public point of view on where SAP finance transformation is heading, voiced at events, in writing and in front of clients, generates the inbound conversations a pipeline like this is built from.

Qualification

Who you are

You are at your best in front of a client. You open doors, building senior relationships from a standing start and turning them into business. You decide with incomplete information and carry the consequences. You can look at an opportunity, judge honestly whether it is real, and say no to a client and to your own organisation when the answer is no. You hold a position under pressure from a client executive who would rather hear something else, because being trusted is worth more to you than being agreeable. You carry commercial risk calmly, and you're candid upstream early when something you own isn't going to land. You communicate without ego. You can chair a room of a client's finance and technology leadership, explain a design trade-off to a CFO and to a CIO in the terms each of them cares about, and disagree without losing the relationship. And you build around yourself: you back the people you bring through, and you measure yourself on having grown a team that can win work without you in the room.

Things that set strong candidates apart: the years you have spent originating, shaping and closing SAP-enabled finance work at deal level, within a broader track record (typically 12+ years) in enterprise finance transformation; senior client relationships you have built and can build again; experience leading discovery and early design phases on large finance transformation programmes; breadth across more than one finance platform, so your advice isn't tied to one product; the ability to hold a credible conversation with a client's finance leadership about SAP Business AI, Joule and agentic AI in finance, covering what is real today, what is roadmap, and what it means for a programme; and a professional finance or accounting qualification (ACA, ACCA, CIMA or equivalent industry experience).

If you have most of this and the drive to build the rest, we want to hear from you. Tell us what you'd bring.

About Finance RP

Within Accenture, the Finance Reinvention Partner helps clients improve financial performance around the CFO agenda - driving best-in-class performance, and sharper insight and benchmarking across the enterprise. In the UK and Ireland, our Finance RP practice brings together finance strategy and the platforms it runs on, including SAP, Oracle, Workday and EPM.

You'd help lead our Platforms transformation offering within the practice : a growing team taking SAP finance transformation to market, and building AI into how we deliver. SAP is where most of the demand in front of us sits, which is why this role sits at the front of the engagement, close to the clients, the market and the CFO agenda the work serves.

What's in it for you

Alongside a competitive salary and package for an Associate Director (dependent on experience), you'll have an extensive benefits package including 30 days' holiday a year, private medical insurance, and 3 additional days' leave a year for charitable work of your choice.

Accenture is an equal opportunities employer and welcomes applications from all sections of society.

Accenture reserves the right to close the role earlier should a suitable applicant be found.

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Locations

London

Birmingham

Edinburgh

Manchester

Additional Information

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