About the Role
This is a varied role within a busy team who provides high quality financial services within the Finance Shared Service / Core Support function of the Business Partnering team, at The Open University.
The role supports collation of financial information for external and internal reporting, as well as projects. It assists with the preparation and organisation of relevant data, allocating to the correct reports, and coordinating submissions to the relevant external or internal stakeholders when complete.
The focus is around transactional entry and processing, ensuring the smooth support to units, faculties, and BP hubs (services include answering queries, entering journals, and general mailbox management), so accuracy and attention detail are key attributes for success. This includes running and distributing routine financial reports to other Finance colleagues, running reports on fee income, tuition, staffing, SCF (Salary Cost Forecast) and projects, as well as the preparation of financial analysis and tables for external returns and documents.
Problem solving, accuracy and attention detail are key attributes for success as the role also covers the collation of necessary information for financial due diligence, credit checks, and maintaining the register tracker.
Key Responsibilities
- Ad hoc and scheduled transactional queries, triaging when needed.
- Journal processing for Management Accounting team.
- Resolving transactional audit queries.
- Monitoring mailboxes and triaging as required.
- Set up and checking of Finance / systems access, using identification and forms.
- Cost centre and Profit centre maintenance and mapping.
- Completing project and donation set up, monitoring, maintenance, and closure.
- Raising sales orders / invoices.
- Running of various reports when needed.
- Document and updating financial processes, principles, and approaches.
- Keep up to date on funder terms and conditions as required.
- Proactive engagement with stakeholders to resolve queries.
- Familiar with latest process and systems guidance, advising colleagues when required.
Skills and Experience
Essential:
- Relevant experience of working in an accounting environment, ideally within management accounts.
- Experience of costing /budgeting / forecasting, as well as basic accounting principles such as debit and credits.
- Sound knowledge of MS Excel (creating tables and charts, using financial Excel functions such as formulas and pivot tables, managing / manipulating large data sets).
- Experience of adhering to accounting conventions, financial regulations, and procedures.
- Ability to manage a wide variety of tasks and prioritise accordingly.
- Excellent oral and written communication skills, with the ability to deal confidently with a range of people at all levels.
- Can demonstrate how they successfully maintain attention to detail.
- Able to demonstrate strong team working and adding value to the team.
- Ability to build and maintain good working relationships within the team and the key stakeholders.
- Balanced approach to hybrid working, both in person and virtually, using varied communication channels as appropriate.
Essential Requirements
Flexible working: We are open to discussions about flexible working. Whether it’s a job share, part time, compressed hours or another working arrangement. Please reach out to us to discuss what works best for you.
Work location: It is anticipated that a hybrid working pattern can be adopted for this role, where you can work from home and the office. However, as this role is contractually aligned to our Milton Keynes office it is expected that some attendance in the office will be required when necessary and in response to business needs. We’d expect this to be three times per week (Tuesday – Thursday).
How to apply: To apply for this role please submit the following as separate documents;
- CV
- Supporting statement, up to 1,000 words, you should set out in your statement why you’re interested in this role and provide examples of where your skills and experience meet the required competencies for this role as detailed in the job and person specification.
Early closing date: We may close this job advert earlier than the published closing date where a satisfactory number of applications are received. We would therefore encourage early applications.
