Organisation: Department of Industry, Innovation and Science
Job Title: Divisional Financial Support – Finance and Co-ordination Support Officers
Word Limit: 750 words per point
Location: Canberra
Please tell us in no more than 750 words about three work achievements that you are proud of.
There are numerous achievements I am proud of from within my last three roles for DTZ and Rydges Hotels. At Rydges Hotels, I was responsible for both the accounts payable and receivable functions. Liaising with a range of other departments, as well as with external stakeholders, I am proud of developing excellent working relationships with them, and working collaboratively to successfully amend any problems or issues which arose during that time. In addition, I am proud of my ability to ensure outstanding monies were identified and followed up, resulting in a strong rate of collections. In fact, during my tenure within this role, I significantly reduced money owing, achieving a value of only 2% of accounts receivable outstanding amounts.
During my role as Energy Database Administrator within DTZ, I was responsible for the management of the large Optus client account. During this role, I demonstrated my ability to build trust with clients and stakeholders through expert customer service and accurate billing. When I left this role to take up my current role, Optus were not pleased that I would not be managing their account any longer, demonstrating the positive relationship I had with them. I am proud of the way I handled the management of this account and, since moving to my current role, have proven my ability to take responsibility for the completion and accuracy of work through the training of a team to ensure accuracy in account management.
Since taking over the account, there has been an array of issues stemming from inaccurate billing and statements not being checked before going out the client. I have spent a considerable amount of time working out what went wrong since I left the portfolio and have discussed with the manager, how we are going to fix the problem.
To rectify the issues, I have gathered a broad range of information from staff and systems, collated this information and am overseeing the determination about what actually went wrong as well as fixing the problems. It would appear that there has not been enough checking and quality control at the last stage of the process, and some of the statements to Optus simply should not have been sent out unchecked.
I have used my organisational and administrative skills to plan and perform training within the department now looking after the Optus account around improvement of processes and practices and have monitored their progress over time. Within this training, I have made a point of explaining why the process of getting the Optus account right is the best thing for our company, this department and also the Optus client. If DTZ were to lose the Optus account, it would make a significant negative impact on the organisation. My own desire to ensure the issues are fixed and to install a range of strategies in the staff to ensure this will not happen again is testament to the drive and integrity I hold.
Within my current role as Property Accountant, I am most proud of my ability to successfully manage five trust accounts, one for each of my clients. This complex role includes a range of tasks related to account management and trust accounting, including:
- reimbursement reporting, including checking invoices processed by the accounts payable team and coding from Property Manager, then raising fund request to client
- payment runs, including checking payments from clients, matching system records and then releasing funds
- disbursement reports, including collecting revenue for clients and releasing revenue to clients
- generating refunds as required and preparing journal entries to fix incorrect coding
- checking invoice variance to ensure accounts payable team are processing correctly
- managing PEMS system, coding and monitoring of staff fund requests to company
- preparing documents and reports to different States by month
- bank balance checks and balance sheet reconciliations
- managing company trust accounts Australia-wide
- budgets, accruals and finance reports for clients
