Finance Assistant at Grand Africa Initiative (GAIN )

The Finance Assistant will be responsible for providing financial and accounting support to the operations team. In addition, the post holder will support the operations team, to develop and strengthen strategies relating to financial and other operations management across the Country Office.

Reporting to the Finance Manager, the responsibilities of the Finance Assistant will include overall responsibility for all aspects of bookkeeping and accounts, procurement support assets tracking and control, effective financial reporting processing in a timely, accurate, relevant, and informative manner and general administration or operations duties. Given the context of responsibilities, it is vital to have a good knowledge of the milieu of international organizations operating on the Grant model of international financing.

Key Responsibilities include

• Responsible for handling all payment processing and cash handling to include documenting resources and transactions; facilitating and post payments; generating payments runs; handling the petty cash fund and replenishment process and maintaining filing; verifying necessary documents; preparing payment requests and presenting for appropriate approvals; ensuring existence/renewal of contracts before effecting payments; preparing payment vouchers.
• Staff Advances: supporting the processing of all employee/consultant claims for travel-related and other expenses; ensuring documentation accuracy and that requests all are in line with policies and procedures; tracking and ensuring that staff advances are liquidated within the approved tenure; ensuring that staff advances are recovered in the currency they are issued; advancing offsets all of the expenses employees submits on the expense report; monitoring ageing and due dates of payables and arranging to account and pay in a timely manner.
• Banking: creating uploads on the internet banking, compiling all requests for cash disbursements, and ensuring all disbursements have appropriate supporting documents; maintaining cheques books; filing all bank statements, track bank deposits and payments etc.
• Internal Controls: supporting to establish and maintain internal control procedures and ensuring that accounting standards are met; ensuring that all the transactions are completely approved by all approval levels; ensuring that internal risks are mitigated; verifying and properly analyzing supporting documents of all payments; ensuring timely payment requests are sent to the Finance Manager for review and to the Country Director for approval.
• Responsible for collecting, collating, managing and analysis of the data.
• Ensure the preparation of the various documents required for operational implementation.

Requirement

• The ideal candidate should have experience within an NGO setting handling payment processing and documenting resources and transactions. You should have experience verifying necessary documents; preparing payment requests and presenting for appropriate approvals; ensuring existence/renewal of contracts before effecting payments; preparing payment vouchers. Knowledge of various donor grant practices highly desirable.
• The post holder should be familiar handling staff Advances by supporting the processing of all employee/consultant claims for travel-related and other expenses; ensuring documentation accuracy and that requests all are in line with policies and procedures; tracking and ensuring that staff advances are liquidated within the approved tenure.
• You should be a team player and able to work with a wide range of stakeholders at support level. Be proactive with a commitment to quality and accuracy with close attention to detail and be proficient in the use of accounting software such as Navision, SAP or related software. An education background with a bachelor's degree in accounting or related discipline is required. Professional certification is desirable.