Accounts Payable Specialist

Questions:
Can you describe your responsibility in your past role. What were you doing on a day to day basis.
Were you entering invoices into the system
How were you receiving invoices
How many on a day to day/weekly
Were you processing payments, did you have a weekly check run
How many payments were you processing a week – they are doing 500 per week
Were you working with account reconciliation with vendors
When they reconcile statements you were using Excel – How are your excel skills
Did you process 1099 in your previous role
What was the most challenging part of your day to day activities in AP

Brief Rundown about the company and the AP role:
Azra been with company a year and half. When she started they were getting ready to move to F&O. Doing data validation/integration. Once they moved to Dynamics there were issues/glitches. Was a rough year end close initially. Been moving and learning and now have a team of professionals who only work in Dynamics. Then took over the Accounting team. Have 4 people in AP. One just retired and the second is going on Maternity leave. The way they function in AP is not traditional (process invoices and send out for approval). They have 100+ offices. 10 different subsidiary. Every subsidiary has 10-20 offices underneath it. Every office is responsible for processing their own invoices. Corporate accounting (Azra) Responsible for making all payments. Every week her team runs their own payroll report for every subsidiary. They figure out which payments are going to be made that week. They pay rent for every office and handled by Azra. One person is responsible for rent and utilities. They are in charge of making sure every invoice in the system is paid on time. Need to make sure the AP accommodates all requests for urgent payments. They are constantly making changes and need to, to make sure they aren’t falling behind. Always looking for better ideas from the team for process improvements.

Will not be processing invoices, will be in charge of making sure all invoices processed are being paid on time.
Get a lot of return payments. Get a lot of emails from clients about missing invoices.
Person she wants will be in charge of their own subsidiary. Two subsidiaries. Will be in charge to make sure vendors are paid on time. Main issue keeping up with payments to go out on time and return checks. Also a lot of client refunds. ACH/Checks
Corporate accounting team does not work directly with vendors. Their customers are the other offices. Send issues back to offices so they can fix the issues on their side.
Does all reconciliations at the corporate accounting team. Done right before month end for corporate credit cards.
When asked to ship something over night to the vendor that office is being charged.

Expectations for new hire: Need someone who can come in and hit the ground running. Very short staffed. Hope is whoever they hire comes in and has the can do attitude of yeah I know this Is a lot of work, it’s messy but we’re going to get it done. Her two AP people are overwhelmed so need someone to come in say what is it we need to do and get right into it. Will be late evenings, espcially on month end.