Working Capital Specialist - Riyadh

About the Job

Working capital management in the MENA region is charged with helping our partners to deliver exceptional client service whilst taking care of the firms own cash and liquidity. We are looking for exceptional cash collection specialists to join this new team to resolve overdue accounts, working with engagement teams and with clients directly to resolve overdue AR by coordinating resolution of disputes that are delaying payments; by progress chasing invoices through customer approval and payment processes and by escalating problematic cases.

The opportunity

This is an opportunity to join a new team and to help achieve outstanding cash-in results in the MENA region. We are looking for someone who has a passion for cash collection, the communication skills to influence many different stakeholders and the intellectual curiosity to want to find out why things have gone wrong and what we can do about it.

Your Key Responsibilities

Managing a portfolio of client accounts:

 Interacting with invoice approvers in the client organisation, often face-to-face, using your influencing skills to overcome obstacles to receiving payments and using your problem solving skills to try and build sustainable solutions to removing those obstacles

Interacting with client Accounts Payable (‘AP’) departments to progress chase invoice approvals and payments; using telephone contact and emails; Monitoring payment arrangements to ensure adhered with and escalating any non-conformance by client through the client AP organization and through the internal engagement team hierarchy

Negotiating with clients to reduce delays imposed by their internal working capital decisions, policies, approval bottlenecks and other causes of payment delays

Dispute management: Logging and progress chasing of invoice disputes internally; supporting root cause resolution through knowledge sharing with upstream activity owners and developing root cause resolutions to internal lead time issues and invoice quality issues

'Know Our Client’ routines: Maintaining up to date records of our clients invoice approval and payment processes; working to align internal and external processes to ensure accounts receivable are minimized

Process and ways of working development: constantly seeking better ways of working across the client engagement-to-cash lifecycle and working with engagement teams to help improve their processes and practices

Client AR account servicing: Tracking delivery of invoices to clients, progress chasing engagement teams and recording status in gCollect tool; generating customer statements, copy invoices, etc; generating payment requests where customer payment processes/local practices dictate; Supporting timely allocation of customer payments, working with engagement teams an Finance; working with those AP departments around account reconciliations

Skills And Attributes for Success

• Negotiating skills & Collections skills: Ability to effectively communicate with clients face-to-face, by telephone and by email to achieve a successful outcome; Active listening skills
• Problem solving mindset: Able to constructively challenge existing approaches; Ability to influence local teams, internal functions and client organizations
• Organization & Prioritization skills
• Numeracy, MS Excel / SAP
• Good knowledge of collections systems and tools
• Appropriate language skills

To qualify you must have:

• Graduate or higher degree in finance, business or related field
• 1-2 + years of finance experience, with particular emphasis on working capital, credit risk, billing and collections
• For internal candidate a knowledge of our engagement lifecycle with a deep understanding of our billing and cash collection processes
• Unparalleled drive to identify root cause issues and support remediation efforts, through a relentless problem-solving ethos
• Knowledge of KSA government agencies and how they work, specifically around approval and payment of invoices

Ideally, you will also have

• Ability to influence cross functional teams, process owners and local leaders
• An understanding of service offerings in a professional services environment
• Experience of deploying new tools and ways of working into remote teams
• Experience of continuous improvement methodologies and leveraging them in a dynamic environment