Senior Manager, IT Finance at UniFirst in Wilmington, MA

Job description

The Senior Manager, IT Finance is responsible for building and managing the IT Finance reporting function and helping manage the financial operations that support Information Technology (IT) and the Strategy Realization Office (SRO). This role creates clear, consistent, and decision-ready reporting across budgets, forecasts, actual results, purchase orders, invoices, capital projects, AI-related investments, and contractor spend. The position partners with IT leaders, Finance, Accounting, Accounts Payable, project teams, and vendors to improve budget accountability, ensure accurate coding and timely approvals, and strengthen monthly planning, close, and reporting processes. Primary Function: Build and lead a standardized reporting function for IT and SRO, bringing budgets, forecasts, actuals, commitments, and accruals together in clear monthly views for leaders. Partner with budget owners to explain variances, identify emerging risks and opportunities, agree on corrective actions, and strengthen accountability for financial performance. Oversee purchase order creation and maintenance, invoice review and approval workflows, and financial coding to support accurate, timely, and well-controlled transaction processing. Build reporting for the capital project portfolio, including approved budgets, capital and operating expense, actuals, commitments, forecasts, remaining funding, and expected cost at completion. Own contractor workforce reporting and governance, including roster accuracy, spend and headcount trends, rates, vendors, managers, approvers, locations, projects, and financial coding. Manage and develop a small team while driving process and system improvements and overseeing AI-related spend to improve data quality, investment visibility, and decision-making. Job Detail: Own the monthly IT and SRO reporting calendar and management package, including budget-to-actual and forecast variance analysis by function, cost center, account, and project. Translate financial results into concise executive summaries, clearly explaining drivers, implications, risks, opportunities, and recommended actions. Support the annual budget, long-range planning, periodic reforecasts, scenario analysis, and ongoing forecast updates with budget owners. Oversee purchase order requests and creation, ensuring the vendor, business purpose, project, cost center, account, capital or operating treatment, and approvals are accurate. Monitor purchase order balances, commitments, receipts, change requests, and closures, and resolve exceptions with business owners. Oversee invoice review and approval workflows, including appropriate routing, timely approvals, purchase order matching, documentation, and resolution of holds or discrepancies. Review financial coding and allocations across accounts, cost centers, locations, projects, and capital or operating expense classifications; coordinate corrections when needed. Track invoices, accruals, commitments, and timing items and reconcile source systems to maintain an accurate monthly view of IT spend. Develop dashboards and KPIs for run rate, forecast accuracy, budget utilization, transaction status, savings, risks, and opportunities. Maintain capital project reporting for approved budgets, actuals, commitments, forecasts, expected cost at completion, and variances. Partner with project and program managers to maintain forecasts and surface overruns, underspend, timing changes, and funding needs. Support capitalization tracking by project and phase and align capital and operating expense treatment with Accounting policy. Maintain the authoritative contractor roster and reporting for headcount, spend, rates, vendors, roles, locations, projects, managers, approvers, coding, and contract dates. Coordinate contractor onboarding, changes, extensions, and offboarding to ensure timely approvals, purchase orders, access, coding, and documentation. Establish standard definitions, controls, documentation, and review routin