Manager, Trade Finance

Kinder's•Walnut Creek, CA

5d•$135,000 - $155,000•Hybrid

About The Position

The Manager, Trade Finance will serve as the primary partner to the Director of Trade Finance, driving the day-to-day accuracy, analysis, and reporting behind Kinder’s trade investment. This role will partner closely with Sales, Sales Operations, Accounting, Customer Finance, and Sales Strategy & Planning to bring more rigor and visibility to how promotional dollars are spent and what they return. This is a highly analytical, technically demanding, builder-oriented role for someone who can operate with real ownership in a function that is still being stood up. Advanced technical and data management skills are core to this role, not a nice-to-have — you’ll be the one building and maintaining the reporting and automation infrastructure this function runs on. You’ll manage trade accrual and reporting and build promotional ROI analysis, helping the organization make sharper decisions even when the available information is incomplete. The ideal candidate combines technical expertise, financial rigor, business judgment, and the ability to communicate effectively with both financial and nonfinancial partners — and is comfortable being one of the first people to build a process rather than inheriting one.

Requirements

Five or more years of experience in trade finance, sales finance, commercial finance, revenue management, or a related analytical role, ideally within CPG.
Advanced expertise in Excel, Power Query, and Power BI, with hands-on experience building and maintaining VBA-based automation — comfortable owning a full reporting and data pipeline end-to-end, not just building individual reports.
Experience extracting, transforming, and reconciling data across multiple systems (e.g., TPM, ERP, syndicated data) into a single reliable reporting source.
Demonstrated experience owning a trade or promotional finance process end-to-end — building it, not just running it — with minimal oversight.
Comfort setting and enforcing financial guardrails that Sales must work within, including the ability to hold a position under pushback.
Demonstrated experience building baseline/incremental volume models and calculating promotional ROI.
Ability to organize, reconcile, and analyze large datasets from multiple sources.
Understanding of financial reporting, forecasting, accruals, and variance analysis.
Demonstrated ability to translate complex analysis into clear, practical recommendations for nonfinancial audiences.
Strong written and verbal communication skills, including experience presenting findings or training cross-functional partners.
Ability to manage multiple priorities, adapt to changing business needs, and exercise sound judgment in an evolving environment.
Strong organizational skills, attention to detail, and commitment to following work through to completion.
A collaborative, service-oriented approach and the ability to build effective relationships across functions.
Curiosity and willingness to use automation and approved AI-enabled tools responsibly to improve productivity and analytical capabilities.

Nice To Haves

Bachelor’s degree in finance, accounting, economics, business, data analytics, or a related field—or equivalent relevant work experience.
Experience in the consumer packaged goods industry.
Experience with trade-promotion management, enterprise resource planning, or financial planning and reporting systems.
Experience developing or maintaining VBA-based automation.
Familiarity with trade deductions, customer programs, and retailer promotional activity.
Experience in a growing or private-equity-backed CPG company building financial processes from scratch.
Experience with SQL or database querying, and building Power BI data models (DAX) rather than report-level visuals only.

Responsibilities

Own the analytics and reporting architecture for trade — dashboards, automated reports, and sales-facing communications — as the volume and complexity of that data grows.
Build and maintain scalable, automated tools using advanced Excel, Power Query, Power BI, VBA, and approved AI-enabled tools to reduce manual effort and improve accuracy.
Extract, transform, reconcile, and load data from the TPM system, syndicated data, and other sources into a single, reliable reporting source.
Set the technical standard for how trade data is structured, validated, and maintained; identify and fix data-quality issues at the source rather than working around them.
Collaborate with adjacent functions — Sales, Sales Operations, Customer Finance, and Sales Strategy & Planning — to simplify workflows and develop scalable reporting solutions.
Identify and implement enhancements that improve reporting accuracy, efficiency, and usability across trade processes.
Train cross-functional partners on trade processes, reporting tools, and relevant financial concepts.
Help establish consistent processes and best practices as Kinder’s trade finance capabilities continue to be built out.
Own the monthly trade accrual process, including true-up against actuals, in partnership with Accounting/FP&A.
Build and publish the monthly trade performance reporting package: spend vs. plan, ROI scorecards, and driver commentary.
Monitor spend-rate tracking vs. plan/budget by customer and channel; investigate variances and communicate risks and opportunities.
Maintain a clean, auditable trail from promo plan through accrual, actual spend, and deduction; support audit and year-end true-up processes.
Build and maintain baseline vs. incremental volume models by customer, channel, and event.
Calculate ROI by promotional event, customer, and brand/SKU; produce pre-event projections and post-event scorecards.
Maintain the shared library of ROI benchmarks by promo types and translate findings into optimization recommendations for Sales.
Partner with the Senior Manager to identify underperforming programs and bring specific, actionable recommendations to Sales.
Support development and maintenance of trade rate guardrails by customer tier.
Support development of promo lift/volume guidelines that Sales Planning uses to build the promo calendar.
Build scenario models for trade rate proposals, price-increase trade-offs, and mechanic mix shifts.
Support broker/distributor settlement validation and help resolve deduction and settlement disputes.
Support monitoring of pricing and promotional execution against contracted retailer terms.
Partner with Sales Operations on trade promotion management (TPM) system data quality to ensure accurate accrual and ROI reporting.
Partner with Customer Finance to reconcile the trade spend view by customer each month.