Finance Officer

Description

Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, is a world-leading independent policy institute based in London. As a global think tank, our mission is to help build a sustainably secure, prosperous, and just world.

Our Finance team are implementing a new finance system over the next year and seek an enterprising and flexible Finance Officer to support the team during this period. This role will be core to the existing team's delivery as they navigate testing, training, design workshops and vendor assessments. They will provide systems cover for the team in areas such as accounts payable, accounts receivable and bank transaction management.

We are an equal opportunity employer. We value diversity and do not discriminate based on protected characteristics. We encourage applications from all backgrounds. If there is anything we can do to improve your experience or support you, please get in touch at HR@chathamhouse.org.

Main responsibilities:

Delivery

Accounts Payables

• Managing payables invoices on SAP Concur, including the posting. This acts as an integration between Concur and the finance system.
• Creating weekly payment runs and ensuring they are appropriately reviewed and paid on time. Occasional urgent payments will need to be processed.
• Creating non-GBP payment batches to be processed through Western Union Global Pay.
• Proactively resolve queries from Western Union on non-GBP payments.
• Banking, and occasional ordering of, and accounting for, cash used for non-UK travel.
• Ensuring that all direct debit accounts are up to date and all payments are matched with invoices.
• Reconciliations of supplier statements.

Staff Expenses

• Ensure monthly processing of staff expenses into the system.
• Review the outstanding staff expenses for completion of records.

Credit card transactions:

• Process monthly credit card spending and keep a record of this in the finance system.
• Review the adequacy of supporting evidence and receipts for each submission and work with the credit card holders to ensure the supporting evidence is provided.

Aged creditors administration

• Regularly generate an aged creditors’ report from the system and analyse the reasons behind the delay in settling the balances.
• Reconcile the aged creditors' balance to the control account and raise to the Head of Finance if there is are any discrepancies.

Sales invoices and credit control

• Raising and posting of sales invoices and handling funder's vendor systems (where appropriate).

Reconciliations and special projects

• Supporting with reconciliations and analysis of key balances and accounts as required.
• Assisting with special projects, such as the annual IRS return, corporation tax returns, income and funding analyses, financial reports, and any other ad-hoc work.
• Entries on the bank statement are analysed and posted.

People

General Queries

• Be the first contact to support CH staff with expense claims, invoices and the whole purchase to pay process flow.
• Supporting the wider finance team with ad-hoc tasks to efficiently manage workload during the migration to a new accounting system.

Credit Control and Receipt Management

• Liaise with research and non-research staff to monitor and chase outstanding debtors.
• Ensure that budget holders are notified of relevant receipts.

Accounts Payable

• Ensuring good customer service is always provided through answering queries from suppliers, consultants and other programmes/departments in a timely and professional manner.

Staff Expenses

• Review the coding, adequate supporting evidence for staff expenses and query if they are incomplete.

Requirements

Skills and Experience:

Essential

• Experience working within a busy finance team.
• An open-minded and flexible quick learner who can quickly adapt to new situations and has delivered excellent work on a short-term contract.
• A proactive, self-motivating approach to work, with a collegiate, collaborative and consistent approach.
• Strong interpersonal skills and comfortable communicating in person, in writing, and over the telephone with individuals, and with both financial and non-financial colleagues.
• Attention to detail.
• Able to work accurately and continuously maintain high standards.
• Intermediate Excel skills.

Desirable

• Accountancy training.
• Previous experience of working with Microsoft Dynamics GP, and SAP Concur, particularly the Invoices module.
• Advanced Excel skills.
• Previous experience of working within the charity sector.

Benefits

Benefits include approximately 37 days annual leave (inclusive of public holidays and Chatham House closure days), enhanced pension scheme, employee assistance programme, life assurance, parental leave and other benefits designed to suit your own personal lifestyle. All of this, in a professional, engaging and intellectually stimulating environment!

Salary: £35,000 per annum

Contract: Full-time role available or 12 month fixed-term contract. Please specify in the application section which role you would prefer.

Closing date: Friday 19 April. You will be notified of the status of your application within 4 weeks of the role closing. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis, we encourage early application as the closing date may be brought forward if needed.

Location: Office/Home with two to three days in the office each week

Please note: We screen candidates anonymously. We will not see your personal information before your application has been moved forward in the process. Please exclude any personal or identifiable information in your application answers including your personal statement.

The Job Description as outlined above will not be available once the closing date has passed. Please ensure you keep a copy for your own record.