Assistant Accountant in London

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 constructively.