FINANCE MANAGER
SLEEMAN BREWERIES LIMITED
Total years of experience :15 years, 4 Months
Managed the Finance Team to ensure the closure of Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, Fixed Assets and General Ledger within the month-end close period and ensured timely reporting of monthly consolidated financial statements in accordance with IFRS and FASB
Reduced month-end close cycle from 6 days to 5 days by: 1. Identifying interdependencies of tasks and re-arranging tasks amongst the Finance Team, 2. Maximizing Oracle’s ability to automate journal entries and tasks and reduce manual work, and 3. Creating checklists to manage all month-end tasks and journal entries
Liaised with external auditors and managed the quarter-end reviews and year-end audits
Designed an Accounts Receivable Credit Check and Credit Limit approval process and implemented the automation of the Order Hold / Release process in Oracle
Developed an Accounts Payable Three Way Purchase Order Matching Process that has minimized the manual accruals prepared at month-end and automated the invoice payment approval process
Managed Oracle super-users, created training documents and standard operating procedures (SOPs), tested Oracle upgrades, performed system set-ups for new operating units, warehouses etc… and monitored AR, AP, Inventory, Cash Management, Fixed Assets and General Ledger modules for errors
Led multiple cross-departmental projects - worked with core team to develop business requirements, designed as-is and to-be business process maps in MS Visio, provided weekly status updates, informed project champion of constraints early, and followed up with task owners to ensure project was completed on time
Supervised 3 Finance Associates who are responsible for the day to day activities associated with 1. Cash management, cash forecasting and bank reconciliation, 2. Fixed assets, 3. Intercompany transactions and reconciliations and 4. Financial System Monitoring and setups
Reviewed, approved and posted journal entries to ensure month-end close process is not delayed
Improved the company’s fixed asset policy based on IFRS and FASB principals and applied it to new projects to determine if they should be capitalized; managed the Fixed Asset database: adding and disposing of assets, and calculating depreciation; and planned semi-annual fixed asset inventory counts for three different plants
Developed macros to prepare Consolidated Financial Statements for Sapporo Canada group and responded to inquiries from the Director of Financial Accounting and VP of Financial Accounting regarding variances
Developed a Risk Scored template for senior management to highlight the companies foreign exchange risk, commodity risk, cash liquidity risk, account receivable risk and breach of covenant risk
Created Access Databases that feed from NOETIX Data Storage and Data Mart to automate extraction of data from Oracle and put them on a server so that users can access the data using Excel tables and pivot tables
Audited Canadian private and public companies in accordance with IFRS or ASPE frameworks; Performed Quarterly Reviews and Audits of US public corporations in accordance with US GAAP & FASB frameworks
Reviewed the working papers of the junior accountants to ensure the they were complete, met the accounting firms quality and addressed at least one assertion (validity, completeness, accuracy)
Performed System Walk-Throughs at client sites to understand the corporation's operations, processes and environment
Assisted in the audit planning meetings by identifying key financial risk areas and proposing audit procedures to address the reasonability of management's assumptions and assertions
Tested internal controls at client sites, identified internal control weaknesses and recommended alternatives to mitigate the risks
Created Business Process Flow Charts of client processes to understand the processes and the surrounding controls in order to determine if the controls can be relied upon
Analyzed cost trends of small companies and suggested areas where costs could be reduce and how to reduce those costs to improve profits
Vouched sales invoices, purchase invoices and bank transactions to ensure the validity and completeness of the transactions and prepared working papers for the senior account to review
Assisted partners in Tax Planning to minimize the personal and corporate tax payable of the owner managed businesses, prepared and Filed T4s and T5s with Revenue Canada
Prepared IT cost accruals and estimated additional consulting and software maintenance costs to ensure all costs incurred by IT were included within the correct period
Analyzed actual costs and compared them to prior period costs to understand why increases or decreases in costs occurred and reported findings to the manager
Performed internal audits, SOX testing and internal control testing to ensure IT systems and controls were secure and reliable in the preparation of financial statements
Reverse engineered the inter-company accrual process and create process flow diagrams which were used to analyze the as-is system and create the to-be system; Designed a new inter-company cost allocation and accrual process that eliminated unnecessary procedures and created a Macro in Excel (using VBA) to automate 90% of the accrual process and saved 2 days of work during month end
University of Toronto, May 2010 - July 2012 Masters of Management & Professional Accounting (MMPA)
University of Toronto, Sep 2005 - Apr 2010 Bachelor of Applied Science in Industrial Engineering (B.A.Sc. in Industrial Engineering) Specialized: Process Improvement, Lean & Six Sigma & Information Systems
