JOB PURPOSE:
• Deliver a professional, high-quality, and seamless Income Management (IM) service for the Council, encompassing all aspects of business-critical cash receipting, recalls, refunds, web payments, E-Forms, and income interfaces.
• Work within a defined financial control framework to ensure controls are in place and adhered to including administering roles and security access to the Income Management system.
• Work with internal services and external customers to ensure end-to-end queries are dealt with efficiently and effectively and maintain good working relationships with service providers and banks.
• Monitor and report on any unallocated cash, under or over payments, and minimise the unallocated cash balance.
DESCRIPTION OF DUTIES:
1. Process income transactions received for the Council through the IM solution including allocations, reallocations, and reversals in a timely manner and with a high degree of accuracy to ensure a full documented audit trail of all Council income.
2. Ensure compliance with guidelines, protocols, and legislation including challenging breaches and below standard business practices across the Council.
3. Administer roles and security access to the Income Management system and ensure licence requirements are adhered to through actively keeping access profiles up to date.
4. Provide expert support and training on Income Management and strive to achieve customer service excellence, monitored through reductions in manual allocations and volume of enquiries received.
5. Manage all banking systems and processes, including administering Bankline, reviewing unpaid Direct Debits, bounced cheques, chargebacks, and other general actions and queries.
6. Analyse unallocated income transactions, maintain, and keep the council wide shared report up to date, and communicate with colleagues across the organisation to ensure prompt clearance of unallocated income items to the correct service cost centres.
7. Manage external customer enquiries raised both directly and through frontline services, from first point of contact through to satisfactory resolution, ensuring issues are fully investigated and documented to evidence the correct outcome was achieved.
8. Improve processes to ensure maximisation of auto allocated cash including achieving KPI for unallocated income clearing, increasing the level of income automatically matched and distributing data to service teams.
9. Provide guidance to officers of all levels within the Council, on best practice to reduce posting errors, remittance and receipting queries, and unallocated income, to accomplish increased efficiency and compliance.
10. Communicate with third parties to resolve queries swiftly, specialist banking teams, government departments, and other external parties and chase remittance advices from third parties where not received to allow allocation of cash within a reasonable timeframe.
11. Advise Cashiers and other cash receiving services on correct accounting treatment of different income streams including VAT implications and ensure the Council’s General Ledger account codes are updated to reflect any new requirements.
12. Collaborate with the Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, and Helpdesk and Systems Admin teams where end-to-end process workflows require cross functional collaboration providing support and advice as needed.
13. Understand the Council’s financial processes, financial systems, and underlying technology and use this knowledge to help the team achieve set standards of performance.
14. Investigate that proper financial controls and governance arrangements are in place and financial regulations are being adhered to consistently across the Council, advising the Income Manager of any failures found.
15. Be responsible for the Income pages on the Finance Hub SharePoint site, conducting general site maintenance, and ensuring that information held is relevant and current.
16. Deal with closure of accounts assigned activities and respond to audit queries including evidencing audit trail of communications with others.
17. Perform BACS report processing including file submissions and automatic direct debit instructions.
18. Perform external system and organisational file loads, including AUDDIS under the guidance of the Income Manager.
19. Undertake Pensions Income Management, including Real Time Information transmissions and clearing unallocated items.
20. Monitor and manage import and export file transfers daily and weekly to ensure load failures are promptly resolved.
21. Use the Income team mailbox as a tool to manage all communications and tasks assigned by the Income Manager, ensuring prompt updates and responses are provided, and the mailbox remains organised and up to date.
22. Manage assigned areas of backlogs in clearing income and their causes and escalate repeated failings to notify the team of coding for income clearance to the Income Manager.
23. Administer the Council’s E-Returns process, providing advice and guidance to end users to ensure accurate submissions and resolving any failures or mismatches.
24. Work in partnership with the Financial Reporting and Controls Team to ensure the prevention of cash allocations to restricted code combinations and provide IM cashbook data in support of information requests relating to the bank reconciliation.
25. Maintain the Council’s master list of IM system income allocation codes, ensuring correct mapping to the main accounting system’s GL coding, enabling auto-matching posting in file loads.
26. Undertake any other duties commensurate with the general level of responsibility of this post.
Skills; Experience and Attitude:
1. Providing services with a customer-centric approach and implementing improvements while effectively managing service demands, pressures, and tight deadlines.
2. Knowledge of how Income Management processes and interfaces work.
3. Experience of using core financial accounting systems with integrated modules.
4. Proficiency in using IT including Microsoft Office products to analyse data and report information.
5. Experience of working in a similar role within a public or private sector organisation.
6. Understanding of accounting principles, policies, and practices and legislation and frameworks applicable to local government.
7. Experience of undertaking work on key financial processes and controls, and ability to monitor and report on these.
8. High degree of numeracy and attention to detail with experience of working with large volumes of data.
9. Good interpersonal skills with colleagues, residents, businesses, and other stakeholders.
10. Good organisational skills with ability to prioritise workload and take ownership of transactions from start to finish.
11. Able to work with minimal supervision and be proactive in problem solving.
12. Experience of maintaining good quality documentation with audit trail to evidence communication with other in allocation of income.
If you are interested in this role please do reach out to me via email or telephone!
amberrayment@carringtonblakerecruitment.com
020 753 766 07
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