About this role
Salary: £50,198 to £57,786 per annum dependent on experience
Home-based: with extensive travel required
Purpose of the job
The Commercial Assurance Manager will provide senior oversight of commissioned-hours assurance, service performance intelligence and exception management across Leonard Cheshire’s care services. The role will initially lead the mobilisation of a commissioned-hours assurance framework and will then maintain that framework as a core business-as-usual monitoring function.
The postholder will create and maintain a reliable baseline of commissioned, billed, rostered and delivered hours to identify unfunded support, correct billing anomalies, support fee recovery, reset staffing assumptions and strengthen confidence in service-level commercial and operational information.
Key responsibilities
- Build and maintain a person-by-person commissioned-hours register by service, commissioner and funding stream.
- Reconcile commissioned hours against billing records, assessed support requirements, rostering practice and actual staffing deployment.
- Identify under-billing, over-billing, missing authorisations, historic anomalies, unfunded support and fee recovery opportunities.
- Work with Operations and Service Managers to clarify core hours, one-to-one support, shared support, waking night support, sleep-in support and exceptional staffing requirements.
- Support the reset of service staffing ratios so assumptions are safe, deliverable, commercially sustainable and capable of being evidenced to commissioners.
- Prepare service-level evidence packs to support fee negotiations, uplift requests and business cases for funding unfunded hours where support need is justified.
- Work with Finance and Contracts to quantify financial exposure, align authorisations, correct billing arrangements and support commissioner engagement.
- Maintain discrepancy logs, RAG ratings, issue trackers and escalation routes, ensuring material exceptions have clear owners, actions and timescales.
- Coordinate regular cross-functional review with Operations, Quality, Finance, Commercial and Contracts to ensure risks are visible and action plans are progressed.
- Produce clear Executive and Board-level reporting on commissioned-hours assurance, service risks, financial opportunity, interventions, escalations and decisions required.
Person specification
Essential requirements
- Significant experience within adult social care, ideally supported living, learning disability, autism, acquired brain injury, complex needs or other regulated multi-site services.
- Experience of commissioner-funded services, fee negotiation, service costing, contract review, operational finance, commercial recovery or service assurance.
- Ability to interpret care packages, funding authorisations, rosters, contracts, billing information, staffing models and service-level financial data.
- Strong analytical capability, including confident use of Excel and the ability to work with incomplete, inconsistent or fragmented datasets.
- Sound commercial judgement, with the ability to identify financial risk, recovery opportunities, margin erosion and value leakage.
- Experience of assurance, performance monitoring, improvement planning, governance, issue tracking and escalation in a complex operational environment.
- Credibility with Service Managers, Regional Directors, Finance, Contracts, Commercial colleagues and commissioners, with the confidence to challenge constructively.
- Clear written communication skills, including the ability to prepare evidence packs, senior reports, commissioner-facing summaries and Board-level briefings.
- Full UK driving licence and willingness to travel to services during mobilisation, review activity and service deep-dives.
- To have a genuine commitment to the values and ethos of Leonard Cheshire.
Our values at Leonard Cheshire
Positive warm and empathetic, we always look to progress and improve.
Proud strong-willed and spirited, we are firm in our beliefs.
Pioneering confident and imaginative, we are creative change makers.
Leonard Cheshire welcomes applications from all sections of the community. We actively encourage applications from people with a disability, supporting where possible, your requirements for reasonable adjustments.