Finance

"Finance" as a graduate job title usually means working inside a company's finance function - tracking where money comes from and goes, producing the numbers that managers and investors rely on, and making sure the organisation pays the right tax, stays within budget and can meet its bills. Graduates typically start in a specific corner of this: management accounting, financial accounting and reporting, financial planning and analysis (FP&A), treasury, or transactional areas like accounts payable and receivable. The customers are internal - budget holders, department heads, the finance director - plus external auditors, HMRC and sometimes lenders or shareholders.

Starting salary: £24k–£32k
Live graduate jobs: 141 open now
Main way in: Finance graduate schemes at large companies
They usually ask for: A degree in any subject for most employers

Approximate graduate salary

Broadly in the region of £24,000–£32,000 to start for most graduate finance roles, with large graduate schemes in London and some sectors paying above that and smaller regional employers below. This varies a lot by employer, sector and location, and whether the package includes funded study and exam leave matters as much as the headline figure. Pay typically steps up noticeably on qualifying.

What you'd actually do

Pulling data out of the accounting system (ERP software such as SAP, Oracle or Sage) into Excel, cleaning it, and building or updating a report - sales by product line, spend by department, cash collected this week
Working through the 'month-end close': checking that transactions have been coded to the right account, posting journal entries for things like accruals (costs incurred but not yet invoiced) and prepayments, and reconciling balances so the ledger agrees with the bank statements and supplier records
Chasing budget holders - a marketing manager, a factory supervisor - for explanations of why their spend was over or under forecast, then writing those explanations up as 'variance commentary' for the monthly pack
Processing or reviewing transactions: approving supplier invoices, setting up payment runs, raising customer invoices, allocating cash received, querying anything that doesn't match a purchase order

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Helping build the annual budget or quarterly reforecast - collecting assumptions from departments, modelling them in a spreadsheet, and flagging where the numbers don't add up
Answering ad hoc questions - 'what did we spend on contractors last year?', 'what's the margin on this customer?' - which usually means working out where the data lives before you can answer
If you're on a study package: attending tutorials, sitting professional exams and revising, often with study leave carved out of the working week

How graduates get in

Finance graduate schemes at large companies - very common, usually two to three years, rotating across areas like reporting, commercial finance, treasury and internal audit, with a professional qualification (CIMA, ACCA or ACA) funded alongside
Direct entry as a finance analyst, assistant management accountant or finance assistant at a small or mid-sized firm - just as common as schemes, often without a formal rotation but sometimes with study support you negotiate yourself
Starting in practice (an accountancy firm) in audit or tax, qualifying as ACA/ACCA, then moving 'into industry' after qualification - a very well-trodden route, though it means three years in a different job first
Transactional roles - accounts payable, accounts receivable, credit control - as a way in. Often advertised as non-graduate, but a genuine entry point, and employers do promote from these into analyst roles

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Public sector and NHS graduate finance schemes, which run their own structured training with CIPFA or CIMA qualifications attached
Internships and placement years - a summer internship or a sandwich-year placement in a finance team is the single strongest thing on an application, and many schemes recruit heavily from their own placement cohorts

What employers ask for

A degree in any subject for most employers - accounting, finance, economics and maths are common but genuinely not required. Accounting degrees accredited by the professional bodies can give you exemptions from some early professional exams, which is a real advantage but not a gate
A 2:1 is the typical bar at large graduate schemes; plenty of direct-entry roles and smaller employers accept a 2:2 or care more about experience. This varies a lot
UCAS points or specific A-level grades (often including maths at GCSE at minimum, sometimes A-level) are screened by some larger employers and ignored entirely by others
A professional qualification is the central requirement over time: CIMA (management accounting, geared to working in business), ACCA (broad, flexible, widely used) or ACA (ICAEW, traditionally the practice route but common in industry too). CIPFA is the public sector equivalent. Most employers expect you to be studying one; whether they pay for it and give study leave varies enormously and is worth asking about directly

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Competence in Excel - not just knowing it exists. Lookups, pivot tables and building a readable model are assumed
Online tests at larger employers: numerical reasoning, situational judgement, sometimes a short case study or a video interview

Skills that matter

Excel to a working standard

Almost every task involves pulling messy data into a spreadsheet and turning it into something someone can act on, and slow Excel work shows immediately.

Spotting when a number is wrong

Much of the value you add early on is noticing that a balance has moved by an implausible amount or a cost has been coded to the wrong department before it reaches the board pack.

Explaining numbers to people who don't like numbers

You will spend real time telling an operations manager why their budget looks the way it does, in language that doesn't involve the word 'accrual'.

Working to hard deadlines

Month-end, quarter-end and year-end do not move, and the whole team's work is sequenced around them.

Curiosity about how the business actually makes money

The difference between a bookkeeper and a finance analyst is being able to say what the numbers mean for the business, which requires understanding the products, customers and operations behind them.

Self-discipline for professional exams

You'll be revising around a full-time job for two to four years, and failed exams can stall a pay rise or a promotion.

Putting these on a CV? We counted which skills 12,914 live graduate adverts ask for, and what to do with the answer — part of our application advice.

Where it leads

Graduate / finance assistant / assistant analyst - building reports, doing reconciliations, learning the systems, starting professional exams. Typically one to three years.
Qualification (CIMA, ACCA, ACA or CIPFA) - usually around three years from starting, sometimes faster with degree exemptions, often slower if you're self-funding or studying part-time. Qualifying is the main step change in pay and in the roles you can apply for.
Management accountant, financial accountant or finance business partner - owning a part of the numbers yourself, working directly with a department or business unit. Finance business partnering (sitting alongside a non-finance team as their adviser) is a common and well-regarded direction.
Finance manager or head of a function (reporting, FP&A, treasury) - managing a small team and the process rather than doing all the work. Timings vary widely here: fast in a growing company, much slower in a large stable one.
Financial controller, then finance director or CFO - or a sideways move into commercial, strategy, corporate development or general management, which a finance background supports well. Plenty of people stop deliberately at manager level; it is not a failure.

What people get wrong

“'Finance' means investment banking, trading and the City.”

Those are a small and distinct part of the sector. The large majority of UK finance graduate roles are in the finance department of an ordinary company - a retailer, a manufacturer, a hospital trust, a housing association - working on budgets, costs and reporting rather than markets.

“You need a finance, accounting or economics degree.”

Most employers recruit from any discipline, and history, languages and science graduates are common in finance teams. The professional qualification you study afterwards is what actually teaches you the technical content; an accounting degree mainly buys you exemptions from early exams.

“It's a solitary job with a spreadsheet.”

Beyond the first year, a large share of the job is negotiating with and persuading non-finance colleagues - chasing them for information, challenging their forecasts, explaining why they can't have the budget they want. People who dislike that find it harder than people who dislike maths.

“Once you have the degree, the studying is done.”

The professional qualification is a multi-year commitment of evening and weekend revision alongside full-time work, and it is the main determinant of your early career progress.

Where this varies

"Finance" covers very different jobs depending on where you land. In a large corporate you'll likely be on a rotational scheme, specialising narrowly (just reporting, or just FP&A) with funded study and clear structure. In a small or mid-sized company you may be one of three people in the finance team doing everything from chasing unpaid invoices to preparing the year-end accounts - broader experience, less structure, study support you may have to fight for. Public sector and NHS finance is heavily process- and governance-driven, often with CIPFA, and tends to pay less at the start but with defined pay bands and good conditions. Financial services firms (banks, insurers, asset managers) have their own internal finance teams which work much like any other company's, and these are different from the front-office roles the sector is better known for. Start-ups and scale-ups offer wide scope and fast progression with correspondingly little training infrastructure.

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General guidance about the role across the UK market, not about any specific employer. Entry routes and requirements vary — always check the individual job advert.