Each month, What's the Score? will shine a spotlight on a specific department within England Lacrosse, giving details of the work the staff in that department are doing.
June’s spotlight is shining on the Finance/Accounts team consisting of Neil Edgar and Sanjay Sathe.
What is your job title?
Neil: My job title is Finance Manager.
Can you give us a general sense of your role?
Neil: My job is to ensure that there's financial probity in the organisation and make sure that monies that come in are spent on what they should be, providing information to the to the board, the Senior Leadership Team (SLT) and down through the staff and then obviously liaising with external third parties, specifically the auditors, Beevers. I also make sure that we produce a set of annual accounts as we have to being a limited company. Other third parties would be Sports England, filling in reconciliations for them, liaising with the bank. They would be the main ones, I think.
And the same questions to you, Sanjay: what is your job title?
Sanjay: My job title is Finance Assistant.
And can you give us a general sense of your role?
Sanjay: My role is majorly about providing financial assistance to the Finance Manager, to the Senior Leadership Team, and also to the staff in terms of expense claim forms or any other financial-related queries that at a lower level can come to me. Of course, if there's something more that needs to be explained, then it goes to the Finance Manager. I also do the updating on a daily basis with the purchase and sales transaction sheets, with whatever movement takes place in terms of invoices to be paid, sales, invoices to be raised, that's part of my role. Then, on a monthly basis, checking and processing expense claim forms, credit card reconciliations across the different credit card holders and making sure we log in their usage and reconciling with the credit card statement. And of course, we have our providers who are outsourcing agencies like Synergy, who keep our stocks and basically I work on reconciliation work with the stock figures with Synergy and so on and so forth. So, yeah, a lot of work around the finance support.
Back over to Neil, what are the big projects you work on every year?
Neil: They’re not really big projects but the big tasks are the budget, then producing the annual accounts, and then in between there’s the quarterly reporting to the various different bodies. So, the Board and Sport England and then anyone else who needs to be availed of those sort of figures. But it's basically a sort of rolling process: you do a budget, you monitor against the budget, when you look at your actuals etc. and then you forecast what's going to happen for the future, so you're always ensuring that you understand what's actually happening in the business and how that results financially and what that means for your finances going forwards especially when cash is a very important thing.
And Sanjay, what are the big projects you work on every year?
Sanjay: For me, there’s nothing as such that I would do on a yearly basis, but whatever work that Neil would do and if he needs any support or information gathering or he needs any data to be collected or put together for his work, I would then help him and assist in that part of the work.
Neil: Sanjay’s basically generating and processing the transactional data and I'm analysing at a higher level, pulling it together and analysing it at a high level. Really, Sanjay is processing all the transactional data. So, purchase invoices that come in, sales invoices that we want to send out, credit card and the Stripe income that we get every week. So it's more hands on and daily/weekly tasks rather than bigger tasks. But then Sanjay is involved in the Finance, Audit, and Risk Committee (FARC) and that's our finance committee that we report to quarterly to review the figures before they go to Board, just so they have a more detailed analysis of it. There's a board member that sits on there, Michael Estill. But then a summary of that basically goes up to the Board each quarter for the board meeting just so they can be kept abreast of it, because they're actually responsible for it.
What new projects have you been working on more recently and what are you doing to get them off the ground?
Neil: It’s all pretty similar stuff for me, some of the things might change slightly, but it's mostly similar stuff.
Sanjay: For me, basically, it’s not exactly new, but I've taken it with more focus, I would say the debt collection because we worked up a plan on how we could get more output and more productivity through the debt collection. So we have made a plan and we're working on that. So I'm kind of doing that. I think it's something I want to say as a new project, but something which has come as a bigger focus for me which I'm working on.
Did/has your role changed during the pandemic at all? If yes, how?
Neil: It changed during the pandemic, yeah, because I went to a job share with England Squash and I'm doing a similar role with them so therefore I'm not full time. With England lacrosse, I'm half a Full-Time Equivalent (FTE). And then Sanjay obviously came in within the first lockdown, in the October period, I think, and he's taken on the transactional because what I was doing was I was doing everything and then I was learning the squash role as well, so it was pretty hard from the March to the October.
Sanjay: I don't think I can say anything because I wasn’t here before the pandemic so I don't really know what it was like before pandemic at England Lacrosse.
Neil: Sanjay's role probably wouldn't be any different because of the pandemic. It's just he's doing it from home which makes it a little bit more difficult because you're not starting the office.
If you were stranded on a desert island and you could take one item with you, what would it be and why?
Sanjay: I’ll answer for Neil, he’ll take his spreadsheets!
Neil: I’ll probably be a bit cheesy and say that I'd have to take my family, I think. But if it wasn't my family then I think it would have to be my pillow, my duck feather pillow, it has to be that really, otherwise I wouldn't get a good night's sleep.
Sanjay: I might take some sort of weapon. The weapon can be used as a tool as well as for defence and in the desert you have animals, you have snakes, scorpions. And I can at least get some food killing scorpions.
Neil: I think you’ve been watching too many films, Sanjay.
Neil and Sanjay have nominated Paul Coups to be interviewed for July’s edition of Spotlight on…