Senior Financial Analyst - Manufacturing Operations

About the role

The Senior Financial Analyst – Manufacturing Operations serves as a key business partner to Operations, Engineering, and Supply Chain leadership. This position is based at Trystar's Faribault, MN manufacturing facility and requires a regular on-site presence.

Responsibilities

• Serve as a financial business partner to manufacturing and operations leadership, providing insights that support profitability, efficiency, and growth.
• Provide actionable analysis to support pricing, make/buy decisions, capital investments, and operational trade-offs.
• Prepare and present financial results, variance explanations, and recommendations to finance and operations leadership.
• Act as the primary finance partner for assigned manufacturing operations, helping leaders understand financial performance and execute improvement opportunities.
• Support manufacturing accounting activities, ensuring accurate costs, inventory valuation, internal controls, and financial integrity.
• Analyze material, labor, and overhead variances, identify root causes, and partner with operations to drive corrective actions.
• Establish, maintain, and analyze labor and overhead rates aligned with budgets, standard costs, and production assumptions.
• Review job costing activity daily to ensure accuracy, completeness, and timely transaction processing.
• Partner with Inventory Control to support inventory analysis, reporting, cycle counts, and adjustments, ensuring strong inventory accuracy.
• Perform monthly inventory reconciliations and support inventory reserve analysis and assist with annual physical inventory observations across the enterprise.
• Provide insight into working capital drivers, including inventory turns and excess/obsolete inventory exposure.
• Partner with Engineering to validate and improve Bills of Materials and Bills of Operations, ensuring ERP accuracy and financial reliability.
• Prepare and maintain standard adjusting journal entries related to manufacturing and inventory close processes.
• Support ERP implementation and optimization efforts (Epicor), with a focus on reporting, costing accuracy, and data integrity.
• Identify and lead process improvement and analytics initiatives that enhance financial visibility and operational performance, including developing and automating dashboards.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Finance, Accounting, or a related field
• 5-8+ years in manufacturing finance, cost accounting, FP&A, or operations finance
• Strong understanding of manufacturing cost accounting, standard costing, and inventory accounting
• Ability and willingness to work on-site at our Faribault, MN manufacturing facility and travel periodically to support other manufacturing locations as needed
• Proficient use of financial systems and Microsoft Office tools, including proficiency in Excel
• Excellent communication skills, with a bias towards collaboration and teamwork
• Advanced analytical skills with the ability to translate data into meaningful financial insights