Corporate Finance

My morning was spent answering queries from the Wales Audit Office as our annual Statement of Accounts are being audited at the moment and there are lots of queries to answer from the auditors so that they can provide assurance that the Force has managed its finances effectively during the year.

I used the onsite gym lunchtime as I like to keep fit.

I conducted a Personal Development Review with a team member in the early part of the afternoon. They are training to be a qualified accountant for which the Force is sponsoring them under a training agreement.

The second half of the afternoon was taken up by a meeting with our tax advisors. My team completes the monthly VAT returns and there can sometimes be complex VAT issues around some of our larger Capital Expenditure projects. It is important to get the accounting treatment correct so we maximise our budgets.

I spent the morning working on the recent pay award that has been offered to colleagues. It is important that everyone’s salaries are updated to reflect this increase so they are paid correctly.

I ate lunch with my next-door neighbour as we are good friends and both work from home around 70% of the time. The Force is a flexible employer and many staff in Finance are able to WFH [work from home] but go into the office on specific days to link in with their colleagues.

In the early part of the afternoon we had our weekly team meeting using MS Teams/video conferencing. This is where we formulate the workplan for the week with our manager.

This week is the final few days for the payroll deadline so the work will be intense checking that all the expenses and overtime claims are accurate and that all the new starters and leavers for the month have been processed correctly.

The last part of the day was spent in a meeting with external suppliers who are helping us make some critical changes to the payroll software related to salary sacrifice schemes.

We are working on a big project at the moment called Pensions Remedy. It concerns correcting a mistake the UK Government made with some changes they made to the Police Pension Regulations in 2015.

I spent the morning checking a database to ensure fields such as length of service, salary history etc were correct prior to the database file being sent to our external pensions administrator.

I spent the early part of the afternoon helping out the payroll team. We all work together at the end of the month to ensure that critical deadlines are achieved.

Towards the end of the day I joined a meeting with the Assistant Director of Finance (ADoF) and the rest of the pension’s team. Since pensions have become really complex over the last 5 years we have a monthly catch up with the ADoF so that all pension’s related work is planned appropriately and that the financial consequences of the same are captured by the Force as part of its financial planning arrangements.