Sarah Tilney Email & Phone Number

South Yorkshire, England, United Kingdom

After making huge leaps forward in Finance processes we ended up with a team at the heart of the company, very much in the loop and working with the wider business. We had controls and processes in place which made the Finance team efficient and well organised. After automating and setting up processes, I realised financial training would help me serve the team more and decided to train in AAT levels 3 & 4, doing self study in my spare time. This knowledge helped me take on more finance tasks, and I became heavily involved in the AR team, setting up new processes, answering team queries, training staff, and covering invoicing, credit control, cash posting, allocation and all other AR functions - eventually being responsible for closing the AR ledger monthly and producing monthly reports on the performance of the accounts. I also spent time covering our Assistant Accountant job, taking on tasks such as journal entries, bank reconciliations, payments out, and other month end closing tasks. I have also worked a little previously with the AP team, putting invoices on and carrying out supplier statements recs. I took on a huge project of account reconciliation on our VB transactions (in the hundreds of thousands of transactions) and identified and rectified other account reconciliations, cleaning up the AR ledger. I was responsible for compliance for the Finance team, being the contact for GDPR changes and implementing them, writing the SOPs for the whole department and being in charge of the business continuity plans. When SVM was taken over by Blackhawk in 2020 my job title was changed to bring it in line with Blackhawk's standard titles. I'm very proud of the work done in the Finance team, and my own personal development within it

Rotherham, England, United Kingdom

My digging led me to our Finance team where I found a demotivated department who felt left behind in SVM's growth. Whilst our Ops team had seen significant improvements to processes, the Finance team had not. I found many gaps in processes and controls, and a breakdown in communication between Finance and wider teams. I was tasked with planning the integration of a new Sage support provider, and figuring out how their products could help us. We realised that we needed an experienced leader within Finance, and when she arrived she asked me to permanently join her team. Our first task was a PR task - I presented to the wider company on what Finance were doing, how it fitted in with their role, and what we needed from them in order to strengthen the department. I began an analysis of all contracts and found and raised around 750k in back-invoicing. I set up a NONBAU entity within the team for our ad hoc services, setting up how to invoice, who to invoice and training a staff member to take this over - invoicing an average of around 100k a month thereafter. I did reconciliations on retailer accounts, finding several instances of over invoicing, claiming back 300k from one retailer alone! I provided re-contracting commercials for a major retailer in this time period. I then took charge of automation for the finance team, working closely with our Tech team, and in house Sage expert. We automated the running off of invoices (freeing up several hours daily) of our fulfilment, reload and digital fees (increasing revenue and saving several hours daily) and our postage fees (increasing client choice as well as our revenue). We automated the requesting of supplier statements, and implemented new, sleek designs for our documentation. We set up a new order form for our Telesales clients, with in built invoicing, saving more time and ensuring everything was charged for. I spent time organising things in the department, and we finally started seeing the woods for the trees!

As sales grew, it became clear that SVM's processes needed to catch up, and I was given the wonderful opportunity to carve out an SVM first - the role of Continuous Improvement Manager! I learned so much in this role, and really had a chance to develop my skills for process mapping, commercial analysis, mentoring and problem solving. During this time period I was given the freedom to use my attention to detail to find the holes in SVM's processes. I found we needed a fraud department for our B2C orders, set one up and trained our first ever dedicated fraud finder! When we won a contract to run a huge retailer's B2C and B2B gift card operations I was tasked with mapping out the processes, setting up and training the team, and supervising them over for their first peak period in 2015. I analysed our contracts and found that we needed to urgently streamline and decide upon a standard to our offering, and pushed the message that if SVM was to cut down on errors and improve it would need to standardise it's commercials. I spent time working closely with our Account Management team, being on hand to answer complicated queries, and to educate them on the challenges faced by the operations team, and how we could provide a better service through better processes. We did extensive work to formalise our order formats and ordering processes which saw a reduction in order processing errors. I also undertook profit analysis on clients, finding areas where we needed to increase our fees in order to keep clients profitable. My Ops background and knowledge allowed me to help our Implementation and Account Management teams to onboard clients, and answer questions on what was and wasn't possible - I expanded my relationship with our client's here by working via email and phone to integrate them into SVM smoothly. I did extensive work in presenting different ways we could charge clients (flat fees, fees per unit, discount margins etc...) within current limitations.

Rotherham, England, United Kingdom

The Fulfilment Supervisor role had expanded hugely, and it had become clear that the Customer Care team did not have the operational knowledge needed to deal with the complexity of the queries they were receiving. We decided at this junction to split out the supervisor role into three individual roles, as well as integrating the queries back into the CC team. I decided to take on the role of Customer Care Manager, as queries and problem solving had been my favourite aspect of the Supervisor role, and my skills had been recognised in this area. As Customer Care Manager I designed and delivered SVM's first ever customer care training course and delivered classroom-style training to four new starters (expanding the team to 8) . I was responsible for all aspects of staff training and management, including one-to-ones, CV review and interview for new candidates, and disciplinary issues. I was also responsible for reporting on quality issues extracted from customer complaints, as well as manager calls and escalations. I was also the point of escalation for the wider sales and account management team. I regularly dealt with clients, and built up a reputation externally as somebody who could get to the bottom of anything, and cared about preventing it going wrong again. I spent a substantial amount of time analysing our queries to find trends, and put controls in place with the Ops team to drive down complaints and queries. I also embarked on an overhaul of our phone systems, implementing a new platform, and even recording our phoneline messaging and IVR system! I also worked with our Tech team to provide more self help customer support via our FAQs, and ordering systems. I reconfigured our use of Sage CRM, designing templates and query progression paths. Many controls and processes were implemented in the Customer Care team, and under my leadership the Customer Care team had it's most successful peak period ever!

Rotherham, England, United Kingdom

I joined SVM after getting a "small family business" feel and it was the best thing I ever did for my career! The role of supervisor expanded a lot during my time in it, and it was a baptism by fire. We were a team of two (later becoming three) and overall were responsible for getting the orders out the door, taking into account a very clunky system, different staff skill levels, and a whole array of different client requirements. Our sales team added ad hoc requirements regularly, and we dealt daily with dozens of different retailers, all working with different systems in order to ensure that the gift cards left the building, and had funds added to them. We had to innovate new processes, and became experts in workarounds, process tweaks, and staff training and skills management. We also became experts in fire fighting, problem solving and complaint handling. As these skills developed, and overtook our customer care team, we were tasked with another email inbox dedicated to customer care escalations, and direct queries from our B2B clients. We were receiving orders directly from clients in a number of different formats, having to translate them into our systems, have the orders picked, checked, and packed, and then have the gift cards loaded. We had to ensure items were posted to client specific deadlines, with client specific postage and packaging requirements. We were then responsible for reporting despatch data internally and externally, chasing stock and load queries with the retailers, and handling any queries or complaints from clients or the customer care team. The landscape of gift cards changed when e-gifts and digital codes were introduced, and we were tasked with a digital inbox, responsible for processing digital orders, handling digital stock, and learning along with the retailers how any of this was supposed to, or could, work! Fast paced, under-resourced and requiring constant innovation meant there was never a dull day!

Rotherham, England, United Kingdom

This was the family business, which I joined initially to supplement a part time job. I quickly took on more responsibility, and moved to full time. I was responsible for all aspects of the pub's running, including full time reliefs (running the pub alone whilst the landlord was away). Tasks undertaken included:Weekly accounts reconciliations.Daily cash taking / banking and reconciliations.All deliveries and stock rotation / stock ordering and bottling up.Planning, decorating and working special events.Staff wage packaging, rota and covering sickness / illness. Training new staff.Catering for the pub, including the daily food menu and catering special events.It was an environment where I learned a lot about working under pressure, and about human nature. It definitely nurtured my creativity and negotiation / conflict resolution skills. Handling drunk people, including having to find ways to remove customers at times (without getting attacked!) really honed my diplomacy and ability to empathise with customers and handle precarious situations. It allowed me to meet a huge variety of people and understand and work with many different personality types, including people experiencing difficult times, and under the influence of a substance which can encourage aggression. We left the pub in October 2010 and I spent the next 3 months working in call centres until finding my next adventure at SVM