London, England, United Kingdom
As Senior Talent Solutions Director within Robert Half’s Talent Solutions Centre, I am responsible for overseeing a portfolio of strategic accounts across London. I specialise in the recruitment of accounting professionals. Our client base includes leading organisations in Commercial Real Estate, Facilities Services, and the Advertising and Media industries.
Financial analyst specialising in Payroll for the Banana Republic brand throughout the U.K., France and Italy. Allocated, maintained and controlled Payroll costs for all Banana Republic stores across the aforementioned markets. • Designed and implemented an entirely new payroll forecasting tool, which subsequently facilitated the weekly/monthly payroll forecasting process for the brand and ultimately led to more accurate submissions with closer month end variances. • Responsible for setting all aspects of payroll (designated hours, total allowable spend, incentive targets) and subsequently monitoring and tracking expenditure on a weekly basis, tasking store managers to bring costs in line where required. • Designed, phased and submitted the yearly payroll budget (circa £7 million), identifying and flowing through cost savings where required. • Restructured, consolidated and streamlined Banana Republic's weekly reporting process through the creation of an automated, multi-product, by market, performance report which resulted in a more efficient and effective reporting system. The new report was subsequently distributed to over 70 users across Europe and North America on a weekly basis. • Construction of Monthly P&L'S for leadership team review, detailing current month and year to date view and potential final year position. • Analysis of weekly performance across all levers (Sales, traffic, conversion, Average Unit Retail). • Engaged with month end processes (Loss prevention & POS maintenance), posting accruals and prepayments as needed.
Sole Commercial Finance Analyst for AutoTrader's Marketing, Motoring Services and Private Sales business divisions. Also obtained experience within other business lines in a previous Commercial Finance Analyst role for the organisation's Display Advertising and Non-Car segments. • Assisted with the creation of revenue and cost budgets and forecasts. • Ensured that forecasting models were robustly maintained and regularly updated. • Prepared, reviewed and analysed business performance reports, to highlight trends or issues that warranted further investigation. Prepared commentary on trends and variances. • Constructed and designed multi-business key performance index dashboards for executive level review. • Developed, implemented and maintained overhead tracker models to ensure expenditure was appropriate and kept in line with forecast and budget. • Engaged with month end processes (S&W and Overheads), by reviewing transactional activity to ensure they were complete and accurate. Posting accruals and prepayments as needed. • Produced monthly payroll reconciliations to ensure all salaries and wages were kept in line with forecast and budget amounts. • Ownership of all marketing and marketing research spend (circa £20 million); ensuring predetermined budget and forecast amounts were being adhered to and costs were allocated to the appropriate financial periods. • Responsible for identifying cost savings and potential for additional expenditure through large marketing purchase order maintenance, tracking and closure. • Took charge of creating commission schemes which enabled simplistic monthly calculations of commission payments that were due to sales representatives. • Performed ad hoc analysis, projects and reporting as required.
Upon graduation undertook a semi-permanent role with Transport for London as an Administration Assistant. • Responsible for organising the many hundreds of complaint e-mails and letters that were received and redirected them to the appropriate departments. • Ensured compliance with the applicable service level agreements so as to optimise customer response rates. My role involved considering each piece of correspondence and making use of the organisation’s various databases to log and input an appropriate description of the complaint.
Competed against other candidates and successfully secured a one year industrial work placement in the Financial Department of the Studio Motion Pictures Division as a Finance Intern. • Demonstrated ability to consolidate film budgets which dealt with predetermined financial resources allocated to advertising and publicity costs along with financial targets for Disney feature films. • Responsible for producing, reviewing and analysing numerical film reports for the sales division. • Compiled mass data to demonstrate the success of Disney movies as compared to rival productions. • Involved in amending and updating the internal sales and marketing system with current film performance figures to ensure that the data was accurate as this information was relied on by all European Disney Offices. • Produced departmental budgets which consisted of the travel and expenses sums of employees. • Undertook several ad-hoc duties including assisting with presentations, providing film related facts and figures to senior executives. Also attended various meetings in place of my manager.