Director of Finance and IT Services
Reports To:
CEO or designated senior executive
Core Competencies:
- Strategic financial leadership with strong operational judgment.
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Ability to translate financial and systems information into clear, practical business recommendations.
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Strong people leadership, coaching, and accountability skills.
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High integrity, discretion, and sound judgment with confidential information.
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Strong systems orientation with the ability to improve workflows, reporting, controls, and decision support.
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Collaborative, service-oriented approach with the ability to work effectively across departments.
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Strong communication skills, including the ability to explain complex financial or technical matters to non-specialists.
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Practical problem-solving ability in a fast-paced, seasonal, and multi-division environment.
Summary:
The Director of Finance and IT Services is a senior leadership role responsible for leading the organization’s financial management, information technology services, business systems, reporting, controls, and administrative infrastructure. This position provides strategic and operational leadership to ensure accurate financial reporting, strong internal controls, efficient technology operations, reliable business systems, and practical decision support for the leadership team.
The role leads three key functions: Finance, through the Controller, Financial Planning and Analysis through an FP&A Manager, and IT Services, through the IT Manager. The Director will ensure both areas are well aligned with business priorities, appropriately resourced, and continuously improving to support retail, wholesale, production, and administrative operations.
Job Duties:
1. Financial Leadership and Governance:
- Provide leadership and oversight for all finance, accounting, budgeting, forecasting, reporting, compliance, and financial control activities.
- Ensure timely, accurate, and meaningful financial reporting to support sound business decisions.
- Lead the annual budgeting process and support ongoing forecasting, variance analysis, and financial planning.
- Oversee cash flow management, banking relationships, insurance, external audits, tax filings, and related compliance requirements.
- Working-capital planning, liquidity forecasting, borrowing requirements, and covenant compliance when applicible.
- Foreign exchange exposure and multi-currency controls and natural gas hedging, where applicable.
- Strengthen financial policies, approval processes, internal controls, and risk management practices.
- Provide financial insight and recommendations to senior leadership on business performance, capital spending, pricing, margins, cost control, and growth opportunities.
- Provide reporting to shareholders on a quarterly basis.
2. Financial Planning and Analysis Leadership:
- Lead the FP&A Manager in developing budgets, forecasts, financial models, business cases, and performance reporting.
- Develop profitability by department, location, product category and customer.
- Strengthen the organization’s ability to analyze margins, sales trends, labour costs, inventory performance, capital investments, and division-level profitability.
- Ensure leadership has clear, timely, and practical financial analysis to support planning, pricing, growth, and operational decision-making.
- Partner with the FP&A Manager to improve dashboards, management reporting, variance analysis, and forward-looking financial insights.
- Develop and report on manufacturing cost accounting which assists leadership team with key decision making.
- Establish consistent business-case and post-investment-review practices for major capital and technology expenditures.
- Provide scenario modelling for seasonal planning, growth initiatives, capacity decisions, and changes in customer or product mix.
- Identify financial and operational performance issues early and ensure corrective actions have accountable owners and timelines.
3. IT Services and Business Systems Leadership:
- Provide strategic and operational oversight of IT services, network performance and reliability, infrastructure, cybersecurity, systems reliability, user support, and technology planning.
- Ensure documented and tested technology disaster-recovery and business-continuity plans are maintained for critical operations.
- Lead the IT Manager in developing priorities, service standards, security practices, system upgrades, vendor relationships, and technology roadmaps.
- Ensure technology systems support business continuity, operational efficiency, data integrity, and scalable growth.
- Oversee the effective use and integration of key business systems, including UKG Ready for payroll and HR processes and Microsoft Dynamics Navision 2018 for retail and finance operations.
- Partner with functional leaders to identify system improvements, reporting needs, workflow efficiencies, and automation opportunities.
- Support data governance, access controls, reporting accuracy, and cross-system process alignment.
4. Team Leadership:
- Lead, coach, and develop the Controller, FP&A Manager, and IT Manager to ensure strong functional performance and accountability.
- Set clear priorities, goals, and performance expectations for the Finance, FP&A, and IT teams.
- Promote collaboration between Finance, IT, HR, retail, wholesale, production, and administrative functions.
- Build team capability through process discipline, communication, training, and continuous improvement.
5. Operational Support and Continuous Improvement:
- Identify opportunities to improve financial processes, reporting tools, system workflows, network and cross-functional communication.
- Ensure business leaders have access to reliable financial and operational information needed to manage their areas effectively.
- Support organizational planning, business cases, major purchases, system implementations, and help to lead change initiatives.
- Develop practical dashboards, reporting routines, and performance indicators that support leadership visibility and accountability.
Requirements:
- Post-secondary education in accounting, finance, business administration, information systems, or a related field.
- CPA designation or equivalent accounting designation required.
- Significant progressive financal leadership, including budgeting, financial reporting, internal controls, and team leadership.
- Experience overseeing or partnering closely with IT, business systems, ERP platforms, cybersecurity, and technology service delivery.
- Experience with NAV, Microsoft Dynamics NAV, Business Central, or a similar ERP/retail finance system is an asset.
- Experience with UKG Ready or another payroll/HRIS platform is an asset.
- Experience in retail, wholesale, production, agriculture, horticulture, nursery, or other seasonal business or manufacturing environments is an asset.
- Experience with multi divisional, company and currency organizations.
Success Measures:
- Accurate and timely financial reporting and forecasting. 15th of the following month or sooner for prior months financial statements and weekly reporting.
- Forecast and budget accuracy.
- Strong internal controls, compliance, and audit readiness.
- Reliable IT services, reliable and functional network, secure systems, disaster recovery plan and responsive user support.
- Improved reporting, data integrity, and use of UKG Ready and NAV to support business decisions.
- Improve training, processes and controls.
- Effective leadership and development of the Controller, FP&A Manager, and Manager, IT.
- Clear alignment between Finance, IT, and organizational priorities.
