Finance Assistant Belfast, Northern Ireland
Job description
Lewis Silkin works with leading businesses to protect and enhance their most important assets - their ideas, their people, their brand and their future. We call it: Ideas. People. Possibilities.
With offices in London, Oxford, Manchester, Cardiff, Belfast, Dublin and Hong Kong, we are recognised by clients and industry alike as being distinct for our unique culture, market-leading practice areas, sector focused approach and for providing solutions to complex, multijurisdictional business challenges, with a pragmatic and human touch. We have two things at our core: people — both ours and our clients’— and a focus on creative, tech and innovative businesses.
Our culture is encapsulated by an ethos of bravery and kindness, guided by our values of Integrity, Clarity, Unity and Excellence (our ‘I-CUE’). We aim to provide a supportive environment for our people, clients and wider community and embrace diversity & inclusion, ensuring people are able to bring their full selves to work.
The Finance department supports all aspects of the firm’s financial requirements from the provision of strategic support through to detailed transactional processing, with a key focus on providing excellent customer service to our internal and external clients. The department is comprised of a central finance team (based in London and Cardiff) plus a London-based operational team covering working capital related activities and cashiering. There is also a small team in Belfast, Northern Ireland which is responsible for the majority of accounting for Belfast and a specialist e-billing team that manages all of the firms ebilling requirements.
The Finance Assistant will report into the Belfast Accounts Manager. They will assist with the Belfast office’s billing, credit control, cashiering, purchase ledger and expenses. They need to ensure compliance with the Solicitors Accounts Regulations and will work closely with and be supported by the finance team in London.
Duties include involvement in aspects of all activities undertaken by the Finance team, and include the following:
Billing
- Attend monthly team meeting to discuss WIP and agree billing for that month.
- Assist with raising pro-formas, engrossing and all other billing related processing.
- Answer any billing queries throughout the month, write offs, transfer requests, invoice re-issues etc.
- Dispatch invoices to clients as needed.
Cashiering
- Check all the bank accounts daily.
- Post any entries from the bank - client and office.
- Input disbursement invoices for payment.
- Post & pay disbursement invoices.
- Post transfers between the client & office bank accounts.
- Assist in bank reconciliations as needed.
- Dealing with banking and lodgements if required.
Purchase ledger/ Expenses
- Post purchase ledger invoices onto the Accounts system.
- Set-up new vendors.
- Dealing with internal and external telephone queries (invoices, expenses etc).
- Responding to any third-party vendor and foreign lawyer queries regarding the status of their invoices.
- Reviewing and processing Partner and Staff expense claims.
- Post bank direct debits.
Credit Control
- Produce monthly statements to send to clients detailing outstanding invoices.
- Communication with clients to follow up on settlement of invoices.
- Respond to any invoice queries.
Experience and skills required
The successful candidate will have some experience of accounting including billing, cashiering or purchase ledger gained within a law firm or other professional services environment and must be able to demonstrate:
- Numerate with excellent attention to detail and a consistently high level of accuracy.
- Good technical skills including Excel and experience of practice management systems, preferably Elite 3E.
- An ability to manage their own time, organise their work and deal with queries efficiently and promptly.
- The ability to work effectively with the rest of the team, supporting others as required across both divisions and demonstrating excellent customer service to internal and external contacts.
- Ability to liaise with members of the wider Finance department to resolve queries and other matters that arise.
- Flexible nature, helpfulness and willingness to take on additional duties.
At Lewis Silkin our ethos is simple. We strive to do the best for our clients, our people and the communities in which we operate. We recognise that an inclusive workplace allows for all kinds of ideas and thoughts, a variety of points of view that can trigger discussions or deliver innovative results, and a wide range of versatile skills and expertise. We are proud of the diversity within Lewis Silkin and of our culture that allows people to be themselves at work, ensuring we provide the best possible service to our clients. We are committed to finding the right person for this role and are open to discussing flexible working patterns and office location.
