Finance Control Analyst

Responsibilities:

General Ledger & Journal Entry Control:

Review the monthly trial balance and general ledger to identify misclassified, duplicate, negative, or unsupported entries. Perform risk-based reviews of manual journals, back-dated entries, reversals, and sensitive account postings, verifying accounting logic and supporting documentation. Monitor temporary, clearing, and suspense accounts, ensuring all open items are promptly investigated, allocated, and cleared. Review account mapping across chart-of-account codes, cost centers, departments, and SKUs to eliminate dimension errors.

Balance Sheet Governance & Reconciliation Oversight:

Review material balance sheet reconciliations—including bank, AR, AP, inventory, fixed assets, and debt—ensuring every balance is fully supported by schedules. Perform subledger-to-general-ledger checks for core accounts and oversee reconciliations performed by the accounting team, challenging aged items until resolved. Reconcile intercompany positions across entities, ensuring matching balances and resolving material discrepancies. Verify period-end cut-off across revenue, purchases, inventory movements, accruals, and prepayments to ensure correct accounting period alignment.

Operational Risk & Working Capital Control:

Review receivables and payables aging ledgers to identify unusual credit balances, unapplied receipts, duplicate vendor invoices, and unrecoverable amounts. Evaluate inventory reconciliations, negative stock entries, and unexpected product-cost or gross-margin movements that signal posting errors. Monitor bank account activities, stale reconciling items, unidentified transactions, and foreign-exchange revaluations for accuracy. Perform reasonableness checks on statutory tax liabilities (VAT/sales tax, withholding tax, payroll taxes), verifying alignment with statutory filings.

Management & Exception Reporting:

Compile a monthly Financial Control Report detailing identified accounting discrepancies, their measurable financial impact, assigned owners, and required corrective actions. Prepare concise monthly P&L and balance sheet variance reviews to highlight anomalies and items requiring investigation. Maintain a central Issues Log to document control deficiencies, tracking corrective actions through to final clearance. Escalate material, recurring, or unresolvable control failures to the Finance Manager/Financial Controller alongside clear supporting evidence and actionable recommendations.

Requirements:

Academic Qualifications: Higher degree (Bachelor's or equivalent) in Accounting, Finance, or a related discipline. Professional Certifications: Active pursuit or completion of a recognized professional accounting qualification (e.g., ACCA, CPA, CIMA, or equivalent) is highly regarded. Required Experience: Proven track record in general ledger review, financial control, internal/external audit, or financial reporting, appropriate for a junior-to-mid-level professional. Minimum of 3–4 years of relevant accounting, financial control, or audit experience.

Technical Skill:

Demonstrated capability working within an ERP or enterprise accounting system. Proven skill in extracting transaction-level detail, running data queries, and tracing ledger entries back to physical source documents. Advanced capability in Microsoft Excel (e.g., lookups, pivot tables, data verification, reconciliation formulas, and structured report layouts).

Core Competencies:

Strong accounting judgement and attention to detail. Financial control and reconciliation expertise. Analytical and investigative thinking. Ability to identify unusual patterns and challenge unsupported balances or transactions. Strong follow-up and issue-resolution discipline. Ability to distinguish genuine business movements from accounting errors. Clear written and verbal communication. High level of integrity, confidentiality and ownership.