How You'll Make a Difference By providing comprehensive financial and data processing services, you will support and contribute to the vital role the finance team plays in ensuring council funds are being distributed, controlled and spent appropriately. In this new role, you can expect to develop your skills across a range of treasury and technical accounting activities including the preparation of the statutory annual Statement of Accounts, VAT compliance, treasury management and capital accounting. This opportunity is being offered as a career graded role. Each grade provides a career path for partially qualified and/or experienced applicants and will enable you to develop into the full requirements of the role. Through a comprehensive training plan, you will grow your skills enabling progression through the grades. Anticipated progression through the grades will be: Hay 9: Finance Assistant Hay 8: Senior Finance Assistant Hay 7: Finance Officer What will you be doing? At Hay 9 Daily, you will maintain and update information systems and databases to ensure that service transactions are completed accurately, and produce reports which will be used by the Accountants to make treasury dealing decisions It will be your responsibility to provide advice and respond to queries from customers and colleagues, ensuring they receive appropriate guidance about policies and processes. You will work across a range of administrative tasks and projects, including carrying out research, collating data, ensuring written reports are compiled and records are accurate. At Hay 8 As the key point of contact for budget holders, it will be your responsibility to provide advice and information using your familiarity with the council’s bank accounts, online banking and cash management You will undertake some accounting reconciliations and budget forecasts Day to day, you will ensure requests from internal and external customers are promptly followed up to maintain a high standard of service. Using your own initiative, you will develop and prioritise you work to meet deadlines. At Hay 7 You will lead on the completion of statutory government returns, providing technical support, advice and guidance. For example, related to treasury investments and borrowing or the completion of monthly VAT returns and the provision of VAT advice and guidance. It will be your responsibility to provide a technical accounting service in support of specific areas of the Council, for example, pensions and lease accounting and involvement in the production of the disclosure notes for the annual Statement of Accounts. To ensure targets are met, you will review and resolve any issues relating to budgets, financial information and resources for your area of specialism. You will also be involved in daily treasury activities. To fulfil statutory requirements, you will ensure councillors, departments, managers and senior leadership teams receive expert advice and information data. You will train other team members to provide back up for treasury-related activities and provide support and guidance as well as set targets, monitor performance and review potential changes to ensure services and projects are delivered successfully. What We Need From You Hay 9 You must have relevant knowledge and experience of working in an organisation that delivers a range of financial and data processing services, including paying and raising invoices and using electronic systems. Given the elements of the role, you will need the ability to analyse and evaluate standard information from a range of sources to inform judgements and make decisions. You should have a good understanding and experience of IT within a finance setting. Ideally, you would need Knowledge of Dynamics D365 & CIVICA Financials. Hay 8 The minimum qualification/experience for this grade would be an AAT Level 3 Diploma in Accounting together with substantial experience attained within the Corporate Finance and Resources Team, or equivalent in local government or public sector financial support services. At this level, you will have gained an in-depth knowledge of daily treasury activities and their significance to the operations of the council, and of the specific systems and software used. You will enjoy taking ownership of the accuracy of the data input to those systems and to be able to spot and resolve errors, where necessary with guidance from the Accountant or Senior Accountant. Your experience will enable you to undertake basic accounts reconciliation work and assist in forecasts and relevant budget monitoring. To progress from the H8 to the H7 grade you would need to attain AAT Level 4 Diploma in Professional Accounting. Hay 7 For this grade, attainment of AAT Level 4 Diploma in Professional Accounting or equivalent is essential, together with post qualification experience. We would expect you to have an in-depth knowledge of daily treasury activities and their significance to the operations of the council, including an understanding of significant cash flows. You must be able to show initiative as you will be responsible for your own work areas, including bank and other account reconciliation work, statutory returns and the preparation of elements of the Annual Statement of Accounts. At this level, we would require you to be able to deal with the full range of duties and responsibilities of the post largely without any assistance from the Accountant or Senior Accountant. How a Career At South Gloucestershire Council Is Different We invest in the careers of our people and we are recognised for the quality, breadth and depth of our training and development offer, which helps our people make the greatest long-term difference in their work. We know our team work best when they have balance in their lives and we offer genuine flexibility to help them achieve that work/life balance. As part of our benefits package you will receive generous annual leave (pro rata), employee wellbeing support and you will have access to a range of staff discounts, including eye tests, travel, shopping and leisure activities. Our teams at South Gloucestershire Council are making a real difference to the lives of people who live, work and learn here. We’re providing essential services across our internal network to ensure we can fully support our community. We’re positive and forward thinking, always looking for new and innovative ways of working work and we’re ambitious about the future.