Overview

The London Borough of Harrow is seeking a Finance Support Officer to deliver high standards of financial processing, monitoring and data accuracy in support of the Housing Needs service. The role is responsible for the timely and accurate processing of statutory rent payments to more than 550 private landlords each quarter under the Private Sector Leasing scheme, as well as the monthly monitoring and payment of emergency accommodation and bed and breakfast invoices with a value of approximately £250,000 per month. The post holder will complete detailed checks of all invoices received from emergency accommodation suppliers, ensure accurate goods receipting, maintain up‑to‑date records and spreadsheets, and confirm that all payments align with data held within HPA2.

The Finance Support Officer will also raise debtor and sundry invoices, purchase orders and cheques in line with the Council’s financial procedures, and extract financial data from a range of databases to support statutory and non‑statutory returns to government departments and partner agencies. A key responsibility of the role is the timely creation of rent accounts for Private Sector Leasing and Paid Accommodation Properties, ensuring strict timescales are met to minimise lost rental income.

Key tasks for the Finance Support Officer will be to raise invoices for emergency accommodation customers who have a shortfall in their rent and to manually update their rent accounts, to work closely with the rent team to effectively monitor the customers rent arrears.

An important objective of the post is to ensure that financial and statistical information is accurately maintained to support the production of robust reports on Housing Needs expenditure by category. These reports are used to inform service planning, validate strategies, identify savings opportunities, support performance management and respond to Freedom of Information requests, contributing to effective decision‑making and sound financial governance across the service.

About You

The successful candidate will have:

Must have a clear understanding of the diverse nature of Harrow’s communities and the implications for strategy and performance development.
Experience of accounting practices, knowledge of financial activities in the public sector and operating financial software preferably D365.
Comprehensive IT skills to produce up-to-date, accurate documents, reports, statistics by interrogating databases.
Good level of numeracy/arithmetic skills. Good oral and written skills.
Ability to work collaboratively as part of a team.
Good organisation skills to ensure accurate storage, maintenance and retrieval of information.
Excellent in the use of MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook.
Excellent written and communication skills.

Related Documents

For more information, please refer to the Role Profile/Selection Criteria