The Ideal Housing Benefits Officer:

• Experience in a junior accounting, finance administration, rent accounting, income reconciliation, or accounts assistant role.
• Experience reconciling financial data from multiple sources, ideally including local authority payment schedules or Housing Benefit information.
• Good understanding of basic accounting principles, reconciliations, debtors, income posting, and financial controls.
• Strong Microsoft Excel skills, including filters, lookups, pivot tables, data cleansing, and reconciliation formulas.
• Ability to review large volumes of data accurately and identify discrepancies, duplicates, and missing information.
• Excellent attention to detail with the ability to meet weekly and monthly finance deadlines.
• Confident communication skills and the ability to liaise professionally with councils, lease partners, and internal teams.
• Organised, methodical, and able to maintain clear audit trails for reconciliation work.
• Experience with Sage is also desirable.

What you will do as a Housing Benefits Officer:

• Reconcile Housing Benefit payments against rent accounts, finance records, and expected income.
• Match local authority payments to resident accounts, placements, and lease agreements.
• Investigate and resolve discrepancies between council records, rent accounts, and lease information.
• Identify and correct missing, duplicate, misallocated, or incorrectly coded Housing Benefit payments.
• Maintain accurate reconciliation spreadsheets, records, and audit trails.
• Support month-end financial processes, including income, accrual, and debtor reconciliations.
• Liaise with local authority Housing Benefit teams to resolve payment and award queries.
• Work closely with Housing Officers, Team Leaders, and operational staff to verify resident movements and rent liability dates.
• Collaborate with landlords and lease partners to ensure rent charges and eligible service charges are recorded correctly.
• Cleanse and maintain Housing Benefit, rent, and lease data to improve accuracy and reporting.
• Produce reports on Housing Benefit income, outstanding queries, payment variances, and aged debt.
• Ensure compliance with financial procedures, internal controls, and audit requirements while escalating complex issues where necessary.

Housing Benefits Officer Benefits:

• 30 Days annual leave, rising 1 day on year 2, year 5, and year 7 to a total of 33 + Bank Holidays
• Summer and Christmas Party
• Staff Incentives such as Ideas Factory and Employee of the month
• Bright Exchange & Blue Light Card for Staff Discounts
• Salaries Reviewed Annually
• Full on-site kitchen facilities including tea and coffee
• Plus more

About Us

Bridge-It Housing provides housing and support to families, single males, and females. We do not discriminate by race, colour, or religion and see each client as an individual, a human being, with the ability to, with the right support, turn their life around.

We work to ensure that all our clients have as much respect, dignity, independence, choice, and control over their own lives as possible.

Empowerment is an important part of how we work. By empowerment we mean building the capacity of people who have experienced homelessness to feel that they are part of our society, regain control of their lives, and become more confident about participating in decisions that affect their future.

We work to foster an environment in which clients take responsibility for their own tasks and actions and learn to respect each other as individuals.

Bridge-It Housing is committed to equality, diversity, and inclusion and welcome applications from all backgrounds, cultures, and identities.

We’re proud to have a diverse team of employees from all walks of life, that are all passionate about supporting those in need, and as helpful as previous experience with supporting vulnerable people is, what matters most to us is that you are passionate, empathetic, and committed to making a positive difference, so if this Housing Benefits Officer role sounds like you, click apply now!