As a Finance Officer, you will work in a small placements team, serving two councils, which commissions placements for children and young people aged 0 - 25 in a range of settings including foster care, residential children's homes, residential parent and child assessment centres and semi-Independent units.

This is a hybrid role working 3 days in the office based between Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea.

Responsibilities to include:

• To manage a range of activities relating to financial payments, management information and processes
• To assist the team and managers to oversee the children's placement budget and meet performance targets relating to the placement of Looked After Children
• To take responsibility for financial management within teams and projects, including savings delivery, and ensures value for money and the efficient use of resources
• To engage with appropriate teams to maximise consensus and manage change effectively; this would also include working collaboratively with professional network for looked after children including social workers, SEN, ICB as well as close working with the independent/private sector to effectively manage the market and ensure future needs are met
• To maintain an overview of children's placements, advising managers on trends and implications, in particularly regarding placement stability and high cost and long-term external placements.
• To work with financial information and a range of systems- eg downloading transactions, running reports.
• To ensure accurate timely payments, resolving supplier (and other) queries, and interrogating systems and processes to support these.
• To provide finance team and social worker teams with financial information relating to placement costs and supplier payments. This will include activity data and unit cost information
• To undertake reconciliations of supplier accounts
• To identify errors on invoices and miscoding and take actions to make corrections
• To assist the finance team with the payment process, relating to invoice queries and follow up with suppliers
• To load commitments onto the social work system and for invoices to be recorded stored appropriately

Key requirements:

• Educated to degree level or equivalent evidence of continuing professional development
• Knowledge of Local Authority finance processes either within a local authority setting or the private and voluntary sector
• Relevant finance experience
• Knowledge of Microsoft Office applications especially MS Excel and Outlook
• Experience of working with Mosaic, preferably within a local authority
• Good interpersonal skills and written communication