As a Trainee Accountant at LB Group Ltd, I work directly with the accounts and audit management on a daily basis. My responsibilities include working from the initial planning stage through to the final review stage of year end accounts for a wide range of clients. I have also taken accountability of producing VAT returns, liaising with clients and involvement in the sample testing, walkthroughs and analytical procedures stages of external audits.I have also been involved in additional responsibilities including producing VAT status reports directly for senior management; this has required building relationships with fellow colleagues, communicating in progress and outstanding VAT returns for each respective month.

In this Financial Analyst role within the controlling team, I was responsible for a number of cost centres across the U.K. In addition, I created monthly period cost reports, which are delivered directly to the Business Unit’s Directors for cost analysis. I communicated my analysis and investigated variances with project managers while making sure I met all cost centre management deadlines.I created a number recharge files, complete journal entries and complete month-end trading. I also investigated any cost centre miss-coding, double entry errors, create accruals and making correction adjustments to the cost centres. Each month multiple hours were spent by the team at month end making monthly adjustments for the fixed allocation costs which are spread across the year and manually adjusted during month end, the busiest period of work. I took the initiative and implemented new automation methods surrounding how the fixed charges and allocations were based on a monthly basis across the U.K. controlled cost centres. This resulted in greatly improving productivity and accuracy while removing unnecessary work during month end. Due to my successful automation I was invited to work on a number of process automation projects, such as the implementation of a new data capture system for the project team’s staff costs. This was previously completed manually with no set format and required standardising before the data could be processed. This has enabled more reliable forecasting and standardised costing across the different cost centres and regions for comparison.

TeamBrophy is a fund raising group aimed at raising money for Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research. The main fundraising activity involved me swimming the English Channel Solo. This required training daily for two years and was finished on the 1st of September 2013 when I successfully swam the English Channel in 14 hours and 52 minutes. This intense training and dedication required determination, commitment, strong time management, and motivation; all of which being transferable skills to both in and outside the work place. Team Brophy demanded strong and clear leadership for a number of decisions such as revenue channels, bag and bucket collection applications, and promotional strategies. The swim and the operational aspects of TeamBrophy required teamwork to be successful. I made sure to keep an open mind when discussing different options with the team and ensured all members felt valued throughout.

I was the Financial Support Manager for Volkswagen’s southern trade parts operations. This involved me liaising with the financial directors of licensed third party businesses. My responsibilities included querying their sales performance figures, budgets and reviews to ensure the profitability and reputation of the Volkswagen brand. I analysed the monthly actual results against the budgeted forecasts figures for both sales and a breakdown of costs, this was taken from the operator’s business plan, in order to measure performance. This information gave me a platform to measure the performance and the profitability of the operator. If a TPS site was to go over budget, the TPS Manager would to be required to justify such overspend. In addition to this I also performed month end reporting, primary for the southern site but also on occasions for the north split also. I managed the networks fuel expenditure and managed the insurance at TPS U.K. level while completing invoices and credit notes and working closely with the accounts payables and receivable teams to ensure quick and accurate payments. Formulated spreadsheets were a critical part of my role in managing the networks performance, accounts and business plans, during my time within the department I was able to enhance and create a number of newly formed spreadsheets to enrich the information being analysed at a head office level. In this role I was able to work closely with both the management accountant as my direct line manager but also the financial accountant where I gained valuable exposure.

As an Operations Administration Coordinator, it was critical to work closely with a number of different departments on various projects. During my time in this role I worked with the Key Accounts Manager; TPS Finance Manager; Operational Manager, and Legal and environmental departments on a number of projects. An example of this would be an environment licence application for a new business revenue opportunity across all sites; here I worked with the Key Account Manager and environmental department as well as the site’s directors. There were often moments where I would be working on several projects simultaneously. Towards the end of this project I was tasked with working on a time-pressured project for the finance team. In order to manage this I created a daily and weekly task list in order to prioritise my assignments effectively and communicate this to the various teams. I troubleshot a number of situations and gave alternative options to the team during my role at Volkswagen. One of my biggest contributions was when I started working with the TPS Management Accountant. This required the creation of a new process involving complex spreadsheets that were both reliable and, with the new functions, time saving. This was used each month for both head office and the operator’s Accountants.