Demand Finance Business Partner (Project Role)

Mars • Chicago, IL

12d • $134,400 - $184,800

About The Position

This role will act as the financial co-pilot for the Marketing and Global Growth functional leaders, providing robust governance, planning, and analytics for all Advertising & Consumer Promotion (A&CP) and Overhead investments. As a key business partner, this position is crucial in establishing budget guidelines, performance metrics, and developing streamlined, automated processes for effective reporting to keep budgets and investments on track. The Senior Manager will provide strategic direction regarding where funding should be prioritized—moving beyond simple budget administration to actively providing direction on where key investment choices should be made and where budget reductions must be met. Importantly, this position is an upgraded role meant to serve as a backfill for an associate on maternity leave. It presents a unique mandate: maintaining essential daily and monthly administrative operations while actively designing and building the automation and self-service foundations that will modernize the department’s processes for the future. This is a temporary transformation role with an expected duration of up to 18 months.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Accounting or Finance.
• Minimum of 8-10 years of business planning and forecasting experience.
• Proven FP&A experience ideally in Corporate or Regional settings.
• Solid financial working knowledge and business acumen
• Strong communication, partnering, and communication skills.
• Exposure to demand co-piloting and Global/ Regional Management Teams
• Very strong Corporate Finance, FP&A and analytical experience
• Business breadth, insight into business and financial processes
• Experience of interaction and working with a range of financial operations teams
• Relevant experience with process management, work processes optimization and planning and aligning work.
• Learning and organizational agility

Nice To Haves

• CPA or MBA preferred.
• Consumer packaged goods experience preferred.
• Statistical management and modelling an asset.

Responsibilities

• Lead period-end execution & operational administration: Ensure seamless business continuity by managing the day-to-day financial administration of A&CP and Overheads. Execute month-end close processes, including booking accruals, processing cross-departmental reclassifications, and executing ledger reconciliations. Maintain tight financial control and ensure audit-ready precision for all transactions.
• Architect and build the self-service solutions: Take hands-on ownership of existing manual data consolidation and reporting workflows. Redesign and transition these processes into automated, self-service tools and interactive dashboards (e.g., using Power BI or advanced modeling). Proactively streamline and phase out time-consuming manual reports during the backfill period to create long-term capacity.
• Transition A&CP from budget-to-actuals to ROI delivery: Establish the foundational frameworks, metrics, and processes required to shift A&CP tracking from transactional execution to value creation. Build preliminary capability models to analyze and report on the Return on Investment (ROI) of marketing and media spend rather than just tracking budget consumption.
• Orchestrate AEP and strategic planning & forecasting cycles: Direct the end-to-end Annual Operating Plan (AOP) and Strategic Plan processes for Overhead and A&CP costs. Act as the central co-pilot providing planning templates, guidelines, and strategic guardrails. Use the current planning cycle as a diagnostic period to identify, simplify, and standardize budgeting workflows across functions.
• Empower and upskill budget owners: Act as a proactive change agent and coach for functional leaders and teams. Foster a culture of financial ownership and accountability by training non-finance partners on how to navigate financial statements, leverage self-service tracking tools, and interpret variance data independently.

Benefits

• company bonus
• Best-in-class learning and development support from day one, including access to our in-house Mars University.
• medical and dental benefits
• participation in 401k plan
• paid time off benefits

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior