Spence & Partners
Accounts Assistant
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About Us
3173 is a privately owned UK firm of pensions experts with clients throughout the UK, serviced from offices in London, Belfast, Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol and Leeds.
The 3173 Group of companies includes Dalriada Trustees Limited (Dalriada), one of the UK’s largest professional pension scheme trustee companies. Spence & Partners provides full pension actuarial, consulting, investment consulting, and administration services that provide simply smarter solutions for trustees, employers, and members, and Mantle reimagines the traditional models of defined benefit pensions administration and actuarial valuation software.
About You
You will be an experienced Assistant Accountant with a minimum of two years’ experience working within a busy commercial finance environment and are looking for the opportunity to develop your career within 3173, a high-growth provider of financial services to the pensions industry. You will be able to demonstrate your practical experience in supporting a commercial organisation through the provision of accurate and timely analyses. You will also have the opportunity to contribute to the preparation of the management accounts across our Group of companies.
You will be a confident communicator with the ability to work with 3173 colleagues both inside and outside the finance team and use your influencing skills to achieve the best outcomes for the business. You will be highly competent in the use of Microsoft Excel. You will thrive in a collaborative, fast-moving team-based environment and be able to support and contribute to the development of the wider Finance team.
You will be a diligent and driven individual with a high level of attention to detail. Someone who is hard-working, confident, thorough, and conscientious will do well in this role. The ability and confidence to highlight and escalate, where relevant, any challenges or risks to the senior leadership team is a must. You will be able to easily build effective working relationships at all levels.
We want the successful candidate to have an opportunity to grow their professional qualifications and capability and career as our business develops. We will offer the successful candidate the opportunity to obtain a recognised professional qualification such as IATI (or similar) with the cost of training and a study leave package fully funded by 3173.
This role within our Finance Department will support our group of businesses across the UK. This role will report directly to the Management Accountant.
The role will include general assistant accountant work, including accounts receivable, billing, and preparation of management accounts.
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As with all of our group supporting roles, you will be working in a fast-paced environment with multiple stakeholders. It is an exciting time to join our group of businesses as we are developing in a number of strategic areas. This role will play a key part in delivering against our growth strategy to ensure we provide a high-quality service and deliver excellent value for money.
Responsibilities & Criteria
Your responsibilities will include:
- Preparing, processing, and issuing accurate client invoices in line with contractual terms, fee schedules, and time sheets.
- Ensuring all billing is correctly recorded in the finance system and reconciled to supporting documentation.
- Investigating, resolving, and responding to internal and external billing queries in a timely and professional manner.
- Responsible for partnering with internal stakeholders to proactively manage and recover outstanding debt, ensuring timely collections, reducing aged receivables, and supporting effective credit control across the business.
- Ensuring that expenses incurred on behalf of clients are captured on a timely basis and invoiced to customers.
- Performing monthly nominal ledger reconciliations as required.
- Assist in the preparation of accurate intercompany reconciliations.
- Assist in the preparation of monthly management reporting packs to allow management to understand and analyse spend versus budget.
- Support the production of management accounting and financial accounting information as required.
- Support the Management Accountant and Group Financial Controller on other tasks as required.
Minimum (essential) requirements:
Technical & Functional
- Degree in a relevant discipline such as finance, accounting, or business.
- Experience working as part of a finance or accounts team within a professional services organisation.
- OR Educated to A-level (to include Maths and English at GCSE level) with a good academic record.
- A minimum of 2 years’ recent experience working in a busy financial environment.
- AND Experience in a client-centric environment.
- Experience undertaking a broad range of financial and bookkeeping duties such as journal postings, ledger reconciliations, preparation of monthly/yearly accounts, accounts payable, accounts receivable.
- Proven ability to calculate, post, and manage financial transactions.
- Recent practical experience of accounting software.
- Practical knowledge of the Microsoft Office suite; particularly in the use of Excel.
- Good understanding of basic accounting principles.
- An awareness of good accounting and regulatory practices.
- Good data entry and numeracy skills.
- Ability to work under pressure with a positive “can do” attitude.
- Strong attention to detail and focus on accuracy.
- Ability to work within a team as well as independently.
- Strong customer service and focus on service excellence.
- Highly flexible, including willingness to work flexible hours at peak times.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English.
- Must be eligible to work in the United Kingdom.
- Be able to commute to our Belfast office two days a week.
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Desirable requirements:
- Degree or other higher-level qualification.
- A minimum of 3 years’ recent experience in a similar accounts/finance position, within a fast-paced, high-growth professional services organisation.
- Qualified or part-qualified Accounting Technician.
- Experience in the use of Oracle NetSuite.
- Experience of using advanced financial modelling techniques such as pivots, macros, or lookups.
Circumstances:
Location: Belfast
Working hours: Monday to Friday, 37.5 hours per week with additional hours as and when required.
All roles are subject to a six-month probationary period and all prospective employees are required to complete an Access NI check.
As part of the pre-hire process, the successful candidate will be subject to reference checking and security vetting.
3173 is an Equal Opportunity Employer.
Applying with a disability or long-term health condition?
As part of our belief that we benefit from the differences among us, we are committed to increasing the representation of disabled colleagues and want to remove any barriers or challenges that get in the way of candidates with a disability or long-term health condition from applying to work with us. As part of this commitment, we guarantee to automatically interview anyone with a disability who meets the minimum criteria.
If there is support or an adjustment that we can provide to enable you to be at your best during the recruitment and selection process, we encourage you to advise us in good time so that we may make suitable arrangements. We understand that being open with us may feel uncomfortable, so please only share with us the information that you are comfortable to share, and rest assured that we will use this only to provide you with the right support. Any information you give us will be treated completely confidentially.
To discuss this further, please call 028 9041 2000 and ask to speak to a member of the People & Culture team.
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