United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland: UK Accountant

General Description of the Programme

GOAL’s Health Unit is a new initiative, building on recent work in the West Africa Ebola response and recognising more widely that there is a significant gap in global health service provision for the most vulnerable and that the international capacity to mobilise and deploy emergency health response resources lags far behind the need.

New health threats, such as the emergence of new type epidemics, increased burden of communicable diseases necessitating the need for long term health care, protracted conflicts and natural disasters destroying health systems, large scale population displacement as well as increasing urbanisation all pose new challenges to global health. This threat was evidenced most recently with the unprecedented Ebola epidemic in West Africa highlighting that the communicable diseases poses one of the largest threats to global security. The Ebola epidemic indicated more clearly than ever before that health challenges cannot be tackled on a country by country basis but that there needs to be a coordinated global health effort to have an increased number of technical response specialists, an increasing amount of data on possible threats and more resilient health systems in fragile countries.

The Ebola response also highlighted that GOAL’s country programmes do not have the technical strengthen to respond appropriately to health crisis to ensure an efficient and effective response without causing undue pressure to the country programme. The proposed Health Unit intends to be able to provide the required technical support to countries to respond to both sudden and on going health crisis with robust evidence and to collaborate strongly with the roving programme quality team to build resilient health systems in fragile states.

This is a new position created due to planned rapid growth of GOAL UK. The UK Accountant will be responsible for the day to day financial management of GOAL UK. This will encompass, preparation of management accounts, statutory financial statements, audit facilitation, budgeting, variance analysis, grant management, payroll, supervision of the payments and receipts functions, company secretarial, and board reporting. The position has dual reporting lines to both the Executive Director of GOAL UK, and the Group CFO.

Responsibilities

Management & Financial Accounting

• Prepare the monthly management accounts within the required timeline for review by management and submission to the board.


• Supervise and review the work of the finance officer who is responsible for: processing all donations on the donations database (Microsoft Dynamics CRM); preparing cash books; supplier payments; banking; and petty cash.


• Manage the payroll process.


• Prepare and post journals as required for the management accounts (accruals, prepayments, donor indirect cost contributions etc), or as a result of variance analysis review.


• Balance sheet reconciliations including intercompany accounts with GOAL Dublin.


• Work closely with the GOAL Global finance team in Dublin to facilitate group reporting and group cashflow management.


• Manage the cashflow of GOAL UK.


• Manage GOAL UK’s banking relationships.


• Preparation of annual departmental budgets.


• Prepare variance analysis reviews for department heads.


• Preparation of GOAL UK statutory financial statements and audit facilitation.


• Prepare ad-hoc reports, analysis, or other facilitation as required.


• Ensure GOAL’s internal controls are followed and remain appropriate at all times.

Grant Management

• Support the UK based Emergency Health Unit to apply for and manage grants from institutional donors. This will involve:


• Budget co-ordination / preparation for grant applications;


• Financial monitoring and management of Health Unit programmes expenditure;


• Co-ordinate collation of expenditure data from several locations for consolidation and reporting to donors;


• Review and critically analyse all financial reports and sub-budgets submitted. Ensure consistency with the related narrative report/proposal. Make recommendations when appropriate;


• Facilitation of donor audits when required;


• If required, travel to country programmes to carry out financial reviews;


• Make recommendations regarding capacity of in-country finance operations to meet support required when EHU deploy to field operations;


• General knowledge of compliance with all relevant donor guidelines in relation to reporting. Working knowledge of each of the major donor’s individual guidelines and templates.

General

• Sustain a strong knowledge of GOAL policies, procedures, and field and HO accounting manuals, including, as required, adaptation for GOAL UK.


• Any other appropriate duties as required by Group CFO or Executive Director.

Person Specification

• Qualified accountant with a minimum five years post qualification experience.


• Experience and confidence in establishing systems and procedures.


• Experience with an international NGO, including an overseas posting, a distinct advantage.


• Strong IT systems experience with MS Office products, accounting systems and reporting applications.


• A self-starter, able to work on own initiative, set own priorities, multi-task, and plan.


• Ability to work as part of a team and communicate effectively with colleagues across all disciplines, and externally.


• Genuine interest in the humanitarian sector.

Salary & Benefits

• Salary Negotiable, dependent on qualifications and experience.


• 22 days annual leave.


• Private health insurance


• Employer sponsored pension scheme after one year’s employment.

Any published closing dates are estimated. Due to the nature of GOAL’s work we aim to fill vacancies as quickly as possible. This means that we will close adverts as soon as we have found the right candidate and this may be before the published closing date. We would therefore advise interested applicants to submit an application as early as possible.