Assistant Accountant

Grafton Banks Finance are working with a respectable services construction company with offices in central London to recruit an Assistant Accountant on an initial 6-month contract to support the business during a busy period. Reporting into the Finance Director and working within a small friendly busy finance team you will be responsible for supporting with the smooth running of the companies' finances.

Duties and Responsibilities will include:

• Transactional processing:
• Processing bank transactions - posting receipts and payments and performing regular bank reconciliations across
• Purchase ledger: raising purchase orders, logging supplier invoices, matching to purchase orders and approvals, coding to the correct nominal, project and VAT treatment, and preparing payment runs for review and authorisation.
• Processing employee expenses and company credit card transactions, including receipt chasing, nominal and VAT coding, and monthly credit card analysis and reconciliation.
• Maintaining the supplier ledger - supplier set-up, reconciliation to supplier statements, and resolution of queries and disputed items.
• Project support:
• Raising and issuing sales invoices in line with the agreed billing cycle, including milestone and stage-based billing, with supporting documentation attached.
• Chasing and monitoring timesheet completion, escalating persistent non-compliance, and ensuring time is posted to the correct project ahead of billing and month-end
• Credit control support:
• Supporting credit controller with collection as and when required
• Month-end:
• Preparing and posting month-end journals, including prepayments, accruals and recurring journals.
• Preparing balance sheet reconciliations with supporting schedules and investigating and clearing unreconciled items.
• Performing analytical review of costs month on month, investigating variances and escalating as required to document any material movements.
• Maintaining the fixed asset register and posting depreciation.
• VAT and year-end:
• Preparing quarterly VAT returns for review, including reconciliation of the VAT control accounts to the return and to the ledgers.
• Maintaining supporting records and audit trail for VAT and for year-end accounts preparation, including responding to accountant and auditor sample requests.

Experience and Key Skills required for the contract:

• AAT Qualified or Part Qualified (ACCA, ACA, CIMA)
• Practical working experience working as an Assistant Accountant running a transactional finance function largely unsupervised, including reconciling to a trial balance.
• Full working knowledge of double-entry bookkeeping, control accounts and the month-end close cycle.
• Practical, up-to-date UK VAT knowledge and hands-on experience preparing and reconciling quarterly VAT returns.
• Strong purchase and sales ledger experience - invoice processing, payment run preparation and bank reconciliation.
• Confident Excel - lookups, pivot tables, filtering and reconciling large data extracts. Excel is used extensively alongside the ERP for analysis and reconciliation.
• Experience working within an accounting or ERP system, and able to get productive in an unfamiliar platform quickly.
• A self-starter: able to take a defined workload, prioritise it independently, work to a fixed monthly timetable, and raise issues early rather than let them run.
• Accuracy and attention to detail, with the discipline to reconcile rather than assume.
• Clear, professional written and verbal communication. The role involves chasing colleagues, clients and suppliers persistently but construc