Title: Client Financial Controller
Hours: Semi-Flexible / 20-25 hrs per week
Salary: £45k to £65k pro rata, subject to experience
About you
We’re looking for a Client Financial Controller to join our small but growing in-house team. As our client base grows significantly, you’ll have the skills and character to wow our clients with impeccable delivery.
The right person will be:
- Curious
- Organised
- An adopter of new technologies
- Systems savvy
- With impeccable stakeholder management skills
About the role
There are four key responsibilities for the right candidate below, but you won’t be doing the exact same thing week in week out!
There will be lots of variation – you can expect this role to evolve over time according to your strengths and interests, and the needs of the business.
Key areas of responsibility:
Client Management
- You’ll be assigned a portfolio of clients and will be the linchpin in those relationships.
- Focused on a flawless client experience, you will ensure that our range of services are delivered to impress.
- You’ll collaborate with our outsourced bookkeepers and payroll providers to clear queries and ensure client accounts are up to date monthly for providing management accounts.
- You will also coordinate purchase ledger and sales ledger services where they are part of our remit.
Practice Management
With more than 60 clients, we have over 100 recurring deadlines to hit every month.
- You’ll help get out practice management software and processes set up and maintained to help us manage these tasks in a timely manner.
- Ensuring nothing gets missed is of obvious importance, but so is holding each of our colleagues (especially the director) accountable for task completion. We’re a friendly and collaborative bunch, but need to be encircled by a slick and professional operation as we grow.
Client Communications
Prompt replies to client enquiries are critical. Poor responsiveness from their existing accountant is the main reason prospective clients give when they seek us out.
- We need to be better and stay better as we grow. There is nothing more important to us than looking after our clients, whatever the challenges.
- Much of our interaction is via email, so you’ll have good writing skills in order to convey our professionalism, competence and trustworthiness. Personality in the way you write is great! Typos are not great.
- We use Xero for payroll too. If you’ve got experience of running payroll, great. If not, that’s fine. Our outsource partners and the tools we use do most of the work and it’ll be reviewed before anything is finalised. But we’ll need you to gather information from clients each month, and ensure it all gets acted on. We’ll give you the necessary training to expand your comfort zone and add a valuable string to your bow.
Bookkeeping
Bookkeeping is the foundation of our higher value reporting and advisory services, and a central component of our differentiated offering.
We sell the service as a route to freeing up the time of our clients, but that theme of freeing up time carries through our own work too. We don’t handle paper, we use software to process receipts and invoices. We put our efforts into driving as much efficiency and automation as possible, so that what is traditionally a mundane task becomes a slick process, enabling our skills in identifying errors and opportunities to come to the fore.
- We’ll ask you to work with other members of the team to support them and provide extra capacity. Partly because that’s helpful, but mostly so you get a hands-on understanding of the work we do.
How an in-house role works
Given the nature of the role and the cloud-based tools that we use, there can be flexibility on how the working week is structured. Whilst this isn’t a home-based role, there is scope for home-working on occasion. Similarly, working hours will be structured, but can be agreed to fit around other life commitments such as school hours and even reduced hours during school holidays.
James Lizars
