Finance Assistant James began his career in recruitment before deciding to become an accountant and taking the ACCA exams. He joined the Core team in late 2012. In the latest Core People blog, James tells us a little more about his role and his favourite place to visit...
What is your role at Core?
I work in the Finance Team. The main part of my role is doing the revenue recognition, invoicing and management reporting on a monthly basis, so that means liaising with both the Project Management and Sales teams to fully understand the billing arrangements on individual projects, seeing how much work has been done on each piece of work, making sure we haven't got any overruns anywhere and ensuring that we are complaint with various accounting procedures. Basically, recognising the revenue across all business lines then creating the invoices and giving those to clients. I also answer client queries. I'm the first port of call when we send an invoice out and if there is a problem with it.
How long have you worked at Core?
Five and a half years.
What do you enjoy most about working at Core?
It's got to be the company culture and the people here. It's very laid back, there's lots of support and everyone seems to be in it together. It's good fun.
What is the most challenging aspect of your job?
There's a few challenging areas. The nature of what we do is very cyclical in terms of time, so the month-end procedures are a challenge. We have a short amount of time to collect all the relevant information and get that out to clients and to the SMT (Senior Management Team). There are a lot of time constraints. Also, accounts departments elsewhere; trying to unpick what they have done with limited information.
What has been your career highlight while working at Core?
When I joined Core there were 12 people in the whole company, so when you're working out what work has been delivered it's quite easy. You can literally ask people to write it down. As we've grown, we've managed to scale up quite well and we still keep things running on track. Mistakes are minimal.
Your sister, Hannah, also works at Core. What's it like to work with a sibling?
Not as bad as I thought it would be! We work together quite closely on an almost daily basis with some of the more complex clients, and it's okay. We occasionally talk about work at the weekend, but we try not to...
Describe working at Core in a sentence...
Like working in a family.
Time for some quick-fire questions!
Do you have a favourite sports team? If so, who?
I am heavily into eSports, rather than traditional sports. eSports is computer gaming. I watch League of Legends on a regular basis and I've travelled to Berlin to watch some professional matches there. In terms of favourite teams, it would be Fnatic.
Are you a cat or a dog person?
Dog.
What is your favourite city in the world?
I loved Riga. It's all open air bars, it's very, very small and it's cheap. That's my favourite city.
