Financial Planning & Analysis leader, systems thinker, business transformer, author and maker.
Adam’s career has never followed a conventional route. Trained in Computers & Communications Engineering, he began in hands-on IT Management and pharmaceutical purchasing, deliberately rebuilt his career in finance, and developed a rare ability to connect commercial insight with systems, data and operational reality.
Some people build careers. Others build systems. Adam Lever has spent more than two decades doing both, driven by a simple instinct: understand how things work, fix what does not, and build something better.
The thread running through Adam’s work is not any single job title. It is his ability to move between technology, finance and operations, see how the pieces fit together, and turn fragmented processes into dependable systems and useful information.
Adam studied Computers & Communications Engineering at the University of Teesside. Artificial Intelligence formed the subject of his final-year project, an interesting early strand of a much broader engineering degree rather than its central focus.
What mattered most was the engineering mindset: logical analysis, curiosity, adaptability and a preference for making things work in the real world.
His earliest work was not technology for its own sake. It involved building PCs, improving infrastructure, creating websites and developing practical applications that helped colleagues do their jobs.
When Adam moved into finance, he brought an unusual advantage: he understood not just the numbers, but also the systems, controls and operational activity that created them.
As IT Manager and Pharmaceutical Buyer, Adam’s responsibilities crossed IT and communications, pharmaceutical purchasing, stock control and purchase-ledger support.
He modernised the desktop estate by sourcing components from computer fairs and building more than twenty black-and-silver Windows XP PCs with TFT monitors in the corner of the finance office. He also upgraded the Windows Server 2000 environment, network switches and telephone system.
Using Dreamweaver MX, he created the company’s first website. He also built a browser-based purchasing system on an Access database hosted on a standalone office PC. The tools belonged to their time, but the idea was forward-looking: central data, browser access, fewer local installations and a more automated process.
Rather than remain on a purely technical path, Adam deliberately built a new career in finance. Roles across ledger management, credit control, rostering, treasury, CIS and month-end accounting gave him a practical grounding in the mechanics of financial control.
His earlier IT experience did not disappear. It became the differentiator that allowed him to improve processes and understand the source, quality and flow of financial information.
At Acorn Mobility Services, Adam progressed from Ledger Manager to Finance Systems Manager. His work spanned international ledger and treasury operations, banking, cash-flow forecasting, reporting and systems development.
He went on to help lead a global SAP Business One implementation, support finance teams across several countries, develop Crystal and SQL reporting, automate workflows and translate local accounting requirements into workable business processes.
At the University of Leeds, Adam worked as a Systems Accountant on finance-process and systems transformation, analysing existing ways of working and helping design future structures, processes and reporting.
At the University of York, his role as Business Change Manager extended that work into wider organisational change, steering finance process and systems development and bringing together stakeholders, requirements and implementation.
As Financial Planning & Analysis Manager, Adam now works at the intersection of finance, technology and operations. His work covers budgeting, forecasting, management reporting, analytics, operational dashboards, systems migration, ESG reporting and process automation across a multi-company group.
The platforms have changed from Lakeview LM4 and Access to cloud accounting, ERP, SQL and modern analytics. The purpose has remained remarkably consistent: turn activity into reliable information, reduce avoidable manual effort and help people make better decisions.
Whether the subject is a finance process, an ERP implementation, a dashboard or a piece of infrastructure, Adam returns to the same four questions.
Outside work, Adam’s interests reveal the same practical and creative instinct that shapes his career.
Adam’s story is one of continual reinvention without losing the original thread. He remains the person who wants to understand the whole system, from the operational detail and the data underneath it to the people who depend on the result.