About the team.

Central to our success as a Firm are of course our talented lawyers, but they couldn't achieve their results without the ongoing support from our Finance Team who have an essential role to play in growing the business and maintaining our financial performance.  Our Financial Planning & Analysis Team, reporting into the Financial Controller, play a critical role; they maintain the firm's accounts, set and manage budgets and analyse and interpret financial data that assists with commercial, Partner and Board decision making.

About the Role.

We're looking for a proactive and technically strong Accountant to join our Financial Planning & Accounting team based out of our Newcastle office. This role sits at the heart of our financial governance, supporting the preparation of statutory accounts, monthly management reporting and a range of compliance activities. You'll work closely with colleagues across the business and with external auditors to ensure accuracy, transparency and timely reporting. It's a great opportunity for someone who enjoys variety, thrives on responsibility and wants to make a meaningful impact within a high‑performing finance team.

This role can be considered on a full time or part time basis, with part time hours being a minimum of 3 days per week.

What You'll Be Doing.

You will be involved in a wide range of financial reporting activities, including preparing group and subsidiary statutory accounts in line with the relevant accounting standards. You'll support and coordinate the year‑end audit process by managing deliverables, liaising with external auditors and ensuring timelines are met. As part of your responsibilities, you will also assist in the year‑end review of Work in Progress, helping ensure accuracy and completeness ahead of audit sign‑off.

Month‑end management reporting will be a central feature of your role, where you'll produce accurate monthly accounts, post journals and carry out thorough balance sheet reconciliations. You'll work closely with budget holders, contributing to both budgeting and forecasting cycles by providing data, analysis and valuable financial insight. You will also prepare quarterly VAT returns, support other compliance submissions and contribute to continuous improvement initiatives across the finance function. In addition, you'll assist the team by responding to incoming queries within the shared mailbox.

About you.

To thrive in this role, you'll be fully qualified (ACA/ACCA/CIMA) with strong technical accounting knowledge and excellent attention to detail. You'll be confident managing deadlines, comfortable juggling multiple priorities and experienced in using Excel to a high standard and have experience with month‑end cycles, VAT returns, reconciliations and audit processes.

We're looking for someone proactive, curious and self‑motivated, with strong communication skills and the ability to work effectively with a range of internal and external stakeholders. You'll be a collaborative team player who enjoys contributing to a positive, supportive working environment.

To be successful in this role, you'll need as a minimum:

• Fully qualified accountant (ACA/ACCA/CIMA)
• Strong excel abilities
• Experience of communicating financial information clearly with non-finance stakeholders
• Experience of managing workloads to meet deadlines
• Previous experience of reviewing or preparing statutory accounts

We continually work hard to create an open culture that sets us apart from other firms. Our culture gives us much more of a human feel, emphasising that we're more than just suits!

As signatories to the Mindful Business Charter, it's important to us that our people are able to maintain healthy and happy lives, both in and out of work. We have a number of resources and initiatives designed to support health and wellbeing and we're very happy to talk flexible working.

Through our DEI initiatives we create an environment in which difference is valued. We have an Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Group, led by our Board Sponsor, which works with our colleague networks (we currently have firm supported networks for race, ethnicity, and cultural heritage, LGBTQ+, disabilities, neurodiversity, families, and women's career development and we're in constant dialogue with our people about how we expand our networks to better support everybody). Find out more about DEI at WBD here. We encourage applicants from all social backgrounds, ethnicities, disabilities, gender identities and sexual orientations.

We are committed to ensuring our recruitment process is inclusive and accessible to all. If you have a disability or long term condition and need us to make any adjustments to give you the best possible recruitment process, please let us know by contacting the recruiter on the right hand side of this page. Please also let us know if you need this job advert or the application form in a different format.

We will offer an interview to candidates with a disability or long-term condition who meet the minimum criteria for this role. You can opt into this scheme within the application form. Your response to this question is only used for this purpose, is only visible to the recruitment team and is not used for data monitoring. 

We are an in-house recruitment team and will always aim to fill our roles directly in the first instance. If you're an agency, please click here for ways that you can work with us.