Expense Analyst - 12 Month FTC

Key Relationships: Finance (incl. Financial Performance team), Accounts Payable, BSS Businss Function Heads, BSS Business Managers and other Business Users.

Job Summary: Specialist insurance company Beazley is seeking an Expense Analyst to support the accurate and timely delivery of the Beazley Shared Services (BSS) expense actuals & planning processes. This is mainly centred around month end processes and landing a month end position (with ledger entries), reconciliations & variance analysis and analytics reporting.

Reporting to the Expense Business Partner, this role is an operationally focused role to optimise the business partnering relationship, driving forward the insight and challenge around numbers reported. This role involves understanding the current and future requirements of BSS and ensuring these are reflected in the actuals and plan as required, with robust challenge to understand movements (increases or decreases) in the expense base. It will also involve helping to define controls and analytics around the BSS processes to explain the result and drive efficiencies across the team.

Key Activities & Areas of Responsibility:

Reporting to the Expense Business Partner for BSS you will be expected to:

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Provide direct support to decision makers:

• Support the delivery of the Expense Actuals process in accordance with pre-approved timetables. This will include all month end ledger entries (for all processes owned), support Purchase Order compliance and uptake, variance analysis with robust and detailed commentary, running analytical processes & embedding the controls and governance framework.
• Support the delivery of the Expense planning process in accordance with pre-approved timetables. This will include understanding BSS requirements (both current and future) and ensuring these are robustly challenged. All submissions should be fully understood with robust commentary to help drive the actuals process on a monthly basis and future planning discussions.
• Build strong relationships with BSS business unit leaders to understand decisions / initiatives and translate these into expense plans. This will require working alongside peers to define the expected outcome from a given planning window.
• Continuously strive to develop reporting capabilities and dashboards for process efficiency and reporting effectiveness.
• Enable rapid interpretation / updates and support via a continuous feedback loop with all stakeholders.
• Effectively communicate to stakeholders by using visuals and story-telling techniques.
• Ensure appropriate control framework is in place to ensure accuracy of reporting.
• Ownership, and development, of the process documentation framework in place for responsibilities and to ensure the completeness and validity of these in line with governance requirements.

‍Facilitate the creation of digital decision support tools:

• Utilise new technology to continue to enhance the current BSS offering, ensuring solutions can be scaled to create efficiency across the Expense Accounting Team.
• Work with the Change Team to ensure that decision support tools provide actionable advice for a variety of operational and strategic decisions.
• Be the “voice of the internal customer” in meetings with Financial Performance, Technology & Change teams to help design intuitive reports, analysis and dashboards that meet the needs of stakeholders.
• Assist in developing change management strategies to facilitate the adoption of new tools and processes.
• Assist in articulating and demonstrating the value of decision support tool utilisation for stakeholders and tailor the message for different audience types.
• Assist in defining success criteria for Performance Management tools and establishing measurable business and technical metrics to actively monitor utilization and quality.

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Core competencies

Core competencies in addition to those noted as specific requirements for the role and which are considered to be pertinent to the Expense team are as follows:

• Financial planning and analysis expertise: Expert knowledge of expense actuals, budgeting and forecasting processes, including the ability to drive continuous improvement in these areas.
• Strategic thinking and business acumen: Deep understanding of revenue drivers, sales optimization, margin management, and metrics cascades to provide insightful, performance inflecting decision support to business leaders.
• Communication and storytelling: Excellent storytelling, communication and presentation skills to effectively convey financial insights, analysis and recommendations to decision makers.
• Advanced technology literacy/proficiency: Ability to exploit digital technologies to drive better outcomes for finance and the business.
• Problem-solving: Ability to challenge assumptions, identify root causes and develop effective solutions.
• Relationship building and collaboration: Proven ability to build strong relationships with business unit leaders and stakeholders. Ability to collaborate with FP&A and technology teams to design intuitive reports, analyses and dashboards
• Continuous improvement: Ability to define success criteria and establish measurable metrics for monitoring tool utilization and quality. Ability to work effectively on a team that uses agile principles to continuously iterate the delivery and development of financial tools and solutions.
• Professionalism: Consistently demonstrates integrity, is highly credible, respectful and trustworthy and represents the Expense Team in a professional manner. Builds and maintains successful working relationships and is seen to go the extra mile.
• Learning and development: Identifies strengths and weaknesses and seeks to improve performance.  Recognises and takes responsibility for mistakes and learns from them. Continually seeks self-development opportunities. Regularly engages in self-assessment and gives/receives feedback to enhance personal awareness.
• Adaptability: Effectively manages changing priorities in a dynamic environment.  Seeks training opportunities to understand new working methods. Proves resilient in uncertain and difficult situations and adapts approach/plans/style as required.  
• Responsibility and Accountability: Assumes full responsibility for the consequences of own behaviour and decisions.  Delivers on commitments to clients demonstrating reliability and dependability. Admits mistakes and takes responsibility for correcting them.  

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General

It is important that within all your interactions both internally and externally you adhere Beazley’s core values - Being Bold, Striving for Better, and Doing the Right Thing. We also expect Beazley employees to:  

• Comply with Beazley procedures, policies and regulations including the code of conduct
• Undertake training on Beazley policies and procedures as delivered by your line manager, the People & Sustainability (P&S) or assurance teams (Compliance, Risk, Internal Audit) either directly, via e-learning or the learning management system
• Display business ethics that uphold the interests of all our customers
• Ensure all interactions with customers are focused on delivering a fair outcome, including having the right products for their needs
• Comply with any specific responsibilities necessary for your role as outlined by your line manager, the P&S or assurance teams (Compliance, Risk, Internal Audit) and ensure you keep up to date with developments in these areas.  This may include, amongst others, Beazley’s underwriting control standards, Beazley’s claims control standards, other Beazley standards & customer relationship management
• Carry out additional responsibilities as individually notified, either through your objectives or through the learning management system. These may include membership of any Beazley committees or working groups

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Personal Specification:

We are a flexible and innovative employer offering a friendly, collaborative,  diverse and inclusive working environment. We actively encourage and expect applications from all backgrounds. We empower people to choose where to work given the work they need to do. Collaboration in office spaces is important but we do not mandate a set number of days in the office or from home – you decide what works best for you and the role you are in.  Beazley will offer the person a competitive salary and discretionary bonus with a strong benefits package including commuting reimbursement, free in-office lunch, excellent parental leave and financial physical and mental wellbeing contributions among others.

Relevant qualifications and capabilities are listed as follows:

Education and Qualifications

• Experienced qualified accountant (ACA/ACCA/CIMA)
• Experience of the financial services or insurance market (preferably Lloyd’s)
• Experience of Expense roles within complex insurance organisations and knowledge of accounting policies adopted

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Capabilities

• Coaching & leadership skills
• Stakeholder management and relationship building
• Customer focus with strong attention to detail
• Understanding of controls frameworks including documentation
• Experience of a deadline driven environment
• Analytical / Problem solving / Decision making
• Creativity / Innovation

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