Senior Finance Officer

Uniperms are recruiting for a Senior Finance Officer to work within our Doctoral College department at The University of Warwick.

The Doctoral College is the central team with oversight of all postgraduate research degrees. They cover a wide variety of functions which requires liaising with every academic department and most professional services teams. They are a small but vibrant team which works flexibly to ensure they provide excellence of service while maintaining healthy life/work balances.

Your role as Senior Finance Officer will be to proactively manage a portfolio of externally funded training grants and studentships from acceptance to closure including budget forecasting, recruitment planning, identifying and maintaining action plans to deal with issues and ensuring the completeness and accuracy of claims and invoices.

Duties and Responsibilities

Financial management (incl. budget setting; profiling and monitoring):

• Monitor expenditure on all programmes, advising the relevant Training Grant (TG) leadership teams / academic departments of any forecasted under or overspends, suggesting and facilitating corrective action.
• Reconcile complex training grants on a quarterly basis, investigating any incorrect postings and variances to budget. Reviewing expenditure to ensure eligible and complaint with funder rules.
• Liaising with TG management teams to provide financial cost forecasts to support key decision making, including student recruitment to ensure the success of the programmes and income recovery is maximised.
• Work closely with people involved in TGs – including funder representatives, academic staff, TG managers, the CDT & PG Scholarships Coordination Manager and academic departmental and central support staff – communicating with people at all levels, both internally and externally.
• Review of profiling of budget on SAP and ongoing maintenance of budgets and forecasts in system, liaising with the department over changes and documenting as appropriate.
• On grant completion ensure grant claims are finalised in a timely manner, and that all required documents and audit trail is archived and kept (electronically) for the contracted period. Ensure documents retained in line with document retention policy, liaising with Departments as appropriate.
• Prepare and submit reconciliations, claims and invoices.
• Perform reconciliations and prepare claims for TGs in line with funder deadlines
• Maintain complete, accurate and auditable working papers supporting claims and invoices
• Correct mispostings/remove ineligible spend in a timely manner where identified as part of the review/reconciliation process
• Ensure claims and invoices are complete and accurate and, following Finance Manager review, submit to funders in line with strict funder eligibility rules and deadlines. Complete claims on various external funder systems as required.

Promotion of Financial Control

• Knowledgeable on funder rules including effectively advising departments on application of these, and identifying and proposing solutions to related issues (e.g. through the ability to vire budgets), escalating to Finance Managers as necessary; keeping up to date with changes and communicating these, and the implications of them, to internal stakeholders as appropriate.
• Understand and interpret complex contracts and funders rules to advise TG and department colleagues on the eligibility of costs that may affect the management of TGs.
• Support the Finance Manager to establish and maintain good working relationships with TG and studentship funders, escalating matters to Finance Managers where appropriate
• Support the Finance Manager in acting as a central point of contact and expertise for departments and funders, and in the liaison between them regarding TG finance and administration.

Month End and Quarter End Reporting:

• Undertake quarter end routines such as income reallocation journal, results analysis and settlement procedure; reconciling balance sheet accounts and training grant profit centres.
• Support the Finance Manager in FCCG reporting of balances greater than £50k and grants with issues making them high risk, providing information and context of the issue and remedial action and progress agreed with management teams.
• Project code set up and administration and close:
• Set up TGs on SAP finance system. Involving project codes set up, budget set up in agreement with grant award letter and original costing. Setting up electronic grant folders including downloading copies of award letters and collaboration agreements, setting up invoicing schedules where appropriate, setting up grant control spreadsheets. Finally, notifying departments teams of set up, highlighting specific funder requirements as necessary via issuing a Budget Award Memo.
• Liaise with research and Impact Services to ensure correct contractual agreements are in place, for example, industry partnership agreements or with partner universities on multi-centre TGs.
• Monitor TGs which have ended and ensure that appropriate actions are taken for a prompt and orderly close of project codes.
• Maintain an action plan for projects codes which have passed end date but not yet closed off
• On completion, ensure all required documents and audit trail is archived and held on file for the contracted period

Audit

• Support the Finance Manager and Management Accountant to arrange audits and prepare documentation for these.
• Respond in a timely manner to basic audit queries from external or internal auditors.
• Management Information; Reporting and Process developments
• Pro-actively identify and notify Finance Manager of any potential improvements to processes or procedures.
• Support the Finance Manager to implement improvements to financial and management systems (maximising use of SAP and other IT) and with the development of reporting for Training Grant finance.

What are we looking for in the ideal candidate?

The ideal candidate will hold an Association of Accounting Technician qualification (AAT) or part CIMA/ACCA (or equivalent). They will have experience of working under pressure to rigid and competing deadlines, which naturally requires strong organisational skills. Problem-solving skills are essential to support the degree of independence the role holder will have. Additionally, it’s essential to be a flexible and responsive team player.