Finance and Budget Assistant

The Finance and Budget Assistant provides administrative and operational financial support within the Common Administrative Platform at United Nations Headquarters. The role involves acting as Certifying Officer in absence of programme managers, monitoring resources, reviewing transactions, and ensuring compliance with financial regulations and policies.

Responsibilities

• Act as Certifying Officer on behalf of and in the absence of programme managers, scrutinizing source documents for completeness, accuracy and validity.
• Provide input into accounting records in accordance with agreements and budget proposals; prepare necessary transactions for budget releases and redeployments.
• Undertake research and provide support to higher level Finance & Budget Officers with respect to budget reviews of relevant intergovernmental and expert bodies.
• Monitor resources administered by One EO, including review of cost plans, ensuring compliance with regulations and rules and established policies and procedures.
• Review requisitions for goods and services to ensure required information accuracy, correct objects of expenditure charged, and availability of funds.
• Review various transactions such as payroll, travel requests and open commitments to ensure correctness of disbursements and adherence to relevant staff rules, financial regulations and rules, ST/AI issuances or practices.
• Analyze complex and/or non-standard accounting transactions and difficult claims for travel and invoices.
• Monitor integrity of various financial databases and expenditures to ensure they remain within authorized levels; liaise with programme managers to prepare adjustments, request liquidation and redeployments as necessary.
• Verify accuracy of input data, validate against the ERP system, ensuring consistency of data with regards to allotments, classes of consumption and balances.
• Investigate erroneous charges, prepare appropriate corrective accounting actions, and compile necessary supporting documentation for corrections.
• Maintain and keep up-to-date on documents/reports/guidelines related to programme, ensuring compliance with intergovernmental recommendations and decisions as well as with United Nations policies and procedures.
• Draft or prepare correspondence to respond to enquiries in respect to relevant financial and budget matters.
• May provide guidance, training and daily supervision to other general service staff in the area of responsibility.
• Perform other related duties, as assigned.

Requirements

• High school diploma or equivalent.
• A minimum of seven years of experience in finance, budget, accounting, administrative, services or related area is required.
• Experience in the administration and management of budgetary resources is required.
• Experience with financial management and transacting in ERP systems, such as SAP (Umoja) is required.
• Experience certifying acquisition of goods/services and travel is required.
• Experience in servicing multiple clients is required.
• Experience in reviewing and reconciling expenditures, and resolving discrepancies is required.
• Experience using Business Intelligence (BI) reports and analytics software, such as Umoja Analytics is required.

Skills

• Budget Administration
• Finance Management
• Accounting
• ERP Systems
• SAP UMOJA
• Budgetary Resource Management
• Acquisition Certification
• Travel Certification
• Client Servicing
• Expenditure Reconciliation
• Discrepancy Resolution
• Business Intelligence Reporting
• Umoja Analytics

Languages

English, French