Job description

Experience:

Discovery:
Strictly Accounts
> Running a parallel billing function
> Using SAP - importing a file into SAP, RAISING INVOICES, RECONCILING and checking them for discrepencies with the invoices recieved from the agent.
> working closely with the AR TEAM, when we had any queries or problems.
> dealing specifically with the interface of AFS and SAP
ETC
>Running the project ( manager ran it from a distance).
>Liaising with different departments - Legal re contracts; Commercial re queries; AR re particular billing or financial data queries; SAP re SAP queries.
>Taking actions to improve processes of project (no pilot run, so lots of queries and processes to speed up and improve efficiency on.
>Heavy Excel use and documenting action


Streetcar:
> Credit control, and dealing with aging receivables (Member Services)
> Matching - invoices and purchase orders.
> Liaising externally with financers and internally with Financial Controller, in order to get timely settlement figures to the financial controller and Clearance of the cars once settled.


Describe your role at Discovery:

At Discovery I was working in the Affiliate Financial Systems team within the finance department. The AFS team is essentially in charge of getting all contracts and financial data of affiliates onto the AFS systemtimeously and accurately, and following up where information does not add up. Following this, it is responsible for the maintainence of all the affiliates' and contracts financial data on the system, and supporting the sales/commercial team with reports of available data to allow them to make optimal commercial decisions relating to contract performance and renewal, and ensuring the AR team have the right information to bill on.

While I was working as part of the AFS team, I was focused on the first phase of a 2 phase project. The initial phase was to bring the billing function, for initailly around 3000 contracts, in-house from an external agent, while the follow up phase was to reduce the number of affiliates by around 80%, as 80% or revenue could be attributed to 20% of affiliates. Prior to the billing being brought in-house, all the relevent affilliate financial data needed to be accurately put into the system, and subsequently a parallel billing function run to error check.

I joined the team and was quickly set to come to speed with the AFS system. Initially there was much liaising with Legal as we set out the process in which to extract the relevant information from the contracts, and began inputting data into the AFS system. Iformation that was all supposed to come through before the start of the project came through in drips and drabs, and a lot of relevent data fields were missing from the contracts, making it impossible to move forward with all contracts in an ordered step by step process, as originally planned. Wherever there were data discrepencies or missing fields, a query would be lodged with commercial, the contract categorised and filed accordingly, and documented on the excel progress tracking sheet. This created a rather challenging situation to document effectively (on excel) - essentially a 3d table, with hundreds of contracts, all at various stages in the procedure, most with several different queries in the process of being resolved. I had to be able at any time to give the physical location of any one of the contracts by looking at the excel spreadsheet and establishing where it was.

As the process moved along, contracts would be accessed in batches from AFS and and export file generated. These were then imported to SAP and using these, invoices raised and reconciled and checked with those provided by the agent. AR would need to be consulted when queries arose regarding the use of either foreign or local currency, or USD, or Tax issues which varied from those countries within the EU and those not.